Surrender To The Universe Quotes

To a mind that is still the whole universe surrenders.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love – for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you from misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

To a mind that is still, the entire universe surrenders.

No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.

Surrendering is the free-falling backwards into the unknown and trusting that The Universe will catch you.

My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself - because it was.

Learn to love better. This should be our goal in the world: learn to love. Life offers us thousands of opportunities for learning. Every man and every woman, in every day of our lives, always has a good opportunity to surrender to Love. Life is not a long vacation, but a constant learning process. And the most important lesson is learning to love. Loving better and better... But one thing will be forever marked on the soul of the universe: my Love. All in spite of my mistakes, my decisions that caused others to suffer, and the moments when I thought it didn't exist.

If hospitals had a flag it would be white—the universal sign for surrender.

All the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. Snuggled together in sleeping bags at the peak, nearly ten thousand feet up, we weathered frigid blasts of wind with coffee someone had been thoughtful enough to bring. And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.

Surrender is the ultimate sign of strength and the foundation for a spiritual life. Surrendering affirms that we are no longer willing to live in pain. It expresses a deep desire to transcend our struggles and transform our negative emotions. It commands a life beyond our egos, beyond that part of ourselves that is continually reminding us that we are separate, different and alone. Surrendering allows us to return to our true nature and move effortlessly through the cosmic dance called life. It's a powerful statement that proclaims the perfect order of the universe. When you surrender your will, you are saying, "Even though things are not exactly how I'd like them to be, I will face my reality. I will look it directly in the eye and allow it to be here." Surrender and serenity are synonymous; you can't experience one without the other. So if it's serenity you're searching for, it's close by. All you have to do is resign as General Manager of the Universe. Choose to trust that there is a greater plan for you and that if you surrender, it will be unfolded in time. Surrender is a gift that you can give yourself. It's an act of faith. It's saying that even though I can't see where this river is flowing, I trust it will take me in the right direction.

Yes, silence is painful, but if you endure it, you will hear the cadence of the entire universe.

In real life we have a hard time recognizing serendipitous moments because we’re not making the story up as we go along. It’s not a lie—it’s really happening to us, and we have no idea how it will end. Some of us will look back on our lives and recall events that were a bit too perfect, but until you know the whole story, it’s impossible to see the universe at work, or even admit that there is something bigger than us, making sure everything that should happen does happen. If you can surrender to the idea that there might be a plan, instead of reducing every magical moment to a coincidence, then love will find you.

And I told him, if I am so hard to love, then let me run wild. My love is not a testament to my surrender. I will show you just how much I love you, with the inward draw of every breath—the collective sigh of the world and all its despair. But I will never give you what you want in chains.

He was clearly used to sucking in the universe, examining it, then bending it to his will.

Am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me?

Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is the enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current....

Don't you think it's good to serve your country?' I asked. 'No, I don't,' Mr Peterson said. 'I think it's good to serve your principles. And in the army you don't get to pick and choose your fights according to your conscience. You kill on command. Don't ever surrender your right to make your own moral decisions, kid.

Knowing you, I became mindless. Having wasted previous wishes, I'm riddled with regrets Feeling you, I became hopeless. Adrift in chasms, I surrender to a caress. Loving you, I became love. My universe became love. Planets rotate on love's axes and apples fall to be near their beloveds. No longer a rationalist, I assert my existence with love. I love, therefore I exist, therefore I love.

Instead of resisting to changes, surrender. Let life be with you, not against you. If you think ‘My life will be upside down’ don’t worry. How do you know down is not better than upside? A good man complains of no one; he does not look to faults. A life without love is of no account. Don't ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material, divine or mundane, eastern or western…divisions only lead to more divisions. Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire! The universe turns differently when fire loves water. The universe is a complete unique entity. Everything and everyone is bound together with some invisible strings. Do not break anyone’s heart; do not look down on weaker than you. One’s sorrow at the other side of the world can make the entire world suffer; one’s happiness can make the entire world smile. Most of conflicts and tensions are due to language. Don't pay so much attention to the words. In love’s country, language doesn't have its place. Love's mute

Your purpose is to be joyful. Your purpose is to live with ease. Your purpose is to surrender to the love of the Universe so you can live a happy life. Accept the purpose of love, and your life will radically change this instant.

When we surrender, we allow the universe to work its magic; we say yes to infinite possibilities; we trust that things will work out as they are meant to; and we give ourselves permission to let go of the outcome. This can be liberating, intimidating, blissful, scary, and a swirl of so many other emotions. But in the end, if we are true to our heart, life unfolds with magnificence…and we get to celebrate

Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.

The poet Hafiz writes, Don’t surrender your loneliness So quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary.

Thank you, spirit, for your guidance. We surrender this grievance to you, and we welcome you in to reorganize all limiting beliefs back to love.

Flowers, trees, rocks... All shapes in nature are beautiful. If you don't resist change and let universe shape your life, it will always be beautiful.

-Desiderata- Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I surrendered my identity in your eyes. Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the way someone falling down in the street is funny. I entered a revolving door and emerged as a human being. When you think of me is my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest satellite dish in the universe, your smile as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed. Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder. I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand. I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence so far, without spilling a drop.

Implicit in wonder is humility. To surrender to what is larger and unknown, to that vast, mysterious universe of which you are a tiny dot. I was not allowed to be a tiny part of anything. I had to be above, the best, on top.

If the Universe wants you do to something, don’t worry. It’ll either give you the ability or send the help . . . if you are open.

WHEN WE SURRENDER OUR WILL TO THE POWER OF THE UNIVERSE, WE RECEIVE MIRACLES. Another

When you realize you’re fighting a fundamental law of the universe, it’s best to surrender to nature.

When surrender happens, the universe itself becomes your Guru and starts walking you to your blissful home.

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

There comes a point in our lives when we must decide for ourselves. Will we surrender to the God of the universe and place our trust in Him as our God, or will we fight against Him?

Life really does favor the obsessed. Great fortune truly does shine on those mesmerized by their gorgeous ambitions. And the universe most definitely supports the human being unwilling to surrender to the forces of fear, rejection and self-doubt.

We can debate whether information or matter is at the heart of the physical universe, but there is no argument that the essential building block of the rock 'n' roll solar system is the van.

Loyalty to a party, Einstein felt, meant surrendering some independence of thought. Such conformity confounded him. “How an intelligent man can subscribe to a party I find a complete mystery,

--that we humans have little or no influence on the two most important moments of our life. Being born and dying. That felt like the right kind of fuck-you to the universe that a great punk rock song requires.

There’s a myth that some people are more faithful than others. A truer statement is that in some areas, some of us are more surrendered than others. We surrender to God first, of course, the things we don’t really care that much about anyway. Some of us don’t mind giving up our attachment to career goals, but there’s no way we’re going to surrender our romantic relationships, or vice versa. Everything we don’t care that much about—fine—God can have it. But if it’s really, really important, we think we better handle it ourselves. The truth is, of course, that the more important it is to us, the more important it is to surrender. That which is surrendered is taken care of best. To place something in the hands of God is to give it over, mentally, to the protection and care of the beneficence of the universe. To keep it ourselves means to constantly grab and clutch and manipulate. We keep opening the oven to see if the bread is baking, which only ensures that it never gets a chance to.

The spirit of the universe dances to its own tune. It connects everything - dust, rocks, plants, animals, men, stars and galaxies - by this mysterious rhythm. The greatest of peace comes from surrendering to its will.

I am alive. I am healthy. I am exactly where I am supposed to be in this moment. I am surrendering to the will of the Divine and of the Universe. I have faith. I am at peace. I am sending love to my fears. I am enough.

There are two contradicting universal principles which, when joined together, can help you lead a most satisfactory life: the first is to seize ever opportunity, and the second is to allow the will of the universe to be done through you.

You must surrender your attachment to the outcome in order to make your greatest dreams come true. You must release your urgency and your need for control. Then your attitude of Trust will actually accelerate the Universal Laws, helping the process along.

The interesting (and sometimes scary) thing about living a purposeful life is you begin to realize that, in a very real way, your life is not your own. You’re not here to just get all the good stuff for yourself — and maybe your loved ones — so you can live a happy, pleasure-filled existence. You are part of a larger organism, a larger system, and all the good that you receive, all the talent you possess, everything that you have, is not for your benefit only — but for the benefit of the whole system. And the more you surrender to this, the more the universe will pour its bounty through you so you can be a bigger giver.

Mantra: My swirling mind becomes peaceful, and my body releases all tension. I surrender to the love of the universe, which heals me totally.

Dear girl with the red scarf, Love was never meant to be conquered. You have to surrender to it. Trust me, after all, I am Mr. Universe.  

It's not surrendering to the Universe, he told me, if all you're doing is sitting around waiting for it to turn out like you hope. —Partial Surrender

When you make this type of commitment to the Universe, it’s important to be aware of any sneaky, fear-based story that can hook you back in. This is the story that pain has purpose. We live in a world that supports drama, terror, separation, and hardship. We’ve been guided to believe that without pain we have not accomplished or achieved. I’m here to bust that myth now. Pain does not equal purpose. Your purpose is to be joyful. Your purpose is to live with ease. Your purpose is to surrender to the love of the Universe so you can live a happy life. Accept the purpose of love, and your life will radically change this instant. Use

It’s all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation … is easy, is quick. There’s also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they’re there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don’t join the dots.… Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that’s a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus.

If we keep trying to obtain something yet our attempts are blocked from every angle, and we can’t figure out why, consider that it might not be the right path for us. Sometimes, surrendering it to the universe and moving on is the most powerful thing we can do—our highest and best path.

My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.

XIV. Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt32 with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

Two things happen at the same time: In inner world, your soul starts surrendering to the supreme soul (Paramatma]. In outer world, a love affair starts between your body-mind and the rest of the universe. And the universe loves like no lover ever can.

before getting started with any aspect of our lives — travel, a project, a meeting — we first bring the task at hand to the attention of the gods or God, our allies in the Otherworld. We openly admit to them what we are facing and how overwhelming it is. By ritually putting what we do in the hands of the gods, we make it possible for things to be done better because more than we are involved in its getting done. Also, willingness to surrender the credit of our accomplishments to Spirit puts us in greater alignment with the Universe. From

Take it easy. Nothing you do matters as much as you think. Your greatest achievements aren’t yours at all, they’re accidents and jokes. You’re a puppet, the universe does the work, and it gets the most done when you’re moving the least. Surrender, flow, relax. Don’t be hard on yourself, don’t put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you’ll be perfect when you’re dead.

Life rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we stop and think about it, that makes perfect sense. The scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years, and the processes that determine the flow of life around us did not begin when we were born, nor will they end when we die. What manifests in front of us at any given moment is actually something truly extraordinary—it is the end result of all the forces that have been interacting together for billions of years.

Surrender allows recovering Nice Guys to see each life experience as a "gift" from the universe to stimulate growth, healing and learning. Instead of asking, "Why is this happening to me?" the recovering Nice Guy can respond to life's challenges by pondering, "What do I need to learn from this situation?

Prime numbers are divisible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies. In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you're about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered.

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty … in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty... in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

The poetry and politics of the Christmas story hit me as if I were hearing it for the first time: the idea that some force of love and logic inside this mysterious universe might choose self-disclosure in the jeopardy of one impoverished child, born on the edge of nowhere, to teach us how we might live in service to one another is overwhelming. Its eloquence is overwhelming. Unfathomable power expressed in powerlessness. I nearly laugh out loud. Genius. Inexpressible presence choosing to be present not in palace but in poverty.

The great human questions arose. What is the purpose of desire? What is a dream? A song? How do we know the depth of silence in another human being? What is the heart? What is it to be a true human being? What is the source of the universe and how do these individual awarenesses connect to that? They asked the Faustian question in many guises: What is it at bottom that holds the world together? How do we balance surrender and discipline? This high level of continuous question-and-answer permeated the poetry and music, the movement, and each activity of the community. They knew that answers might not come in discursive form, but rather in music, in image, in dream, and in the events of life as they occur.

The soul of the Universe awaits to enfold you in pure white light.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces. There are a million ways in which it can be incomplete but there is only one way in which it is complete. Your mind thinks that it is a player with the mission to solve the puzzle of universe. The truth is that mind itself is the last piece of the puzzle. Surrender! Dissolve the mind and be one with the rest of the universe.

God, the universe, life, whatever name you give to the bigger picture, is experiencing itself through you as a human being. A journey from effortlessness, playfulness, freedom, to human doing, suffering and beyond. You can all return to the effortlessness, playfulness, freedom and being, by allowing your moment-by-moment experience, allowing your feelings of pain, suffering, rage, anger and envy to be felt, observed and tenderly allowed. No more self-beating, no more rushing against the tide, no more trying to steer that canoe, for life knows the way, always has and always will.

VALENTINE'S DAY POEM: What earth is to sky.. on the horizon.. What moon is to night.. no matter start studded ocean! What Love is to life.. above all give and take.. that you are to me.. a rhythm that soulful music would make! * Let's surrender to each other.. for a dream to be woven together!! You're my weakness and my strength.. wanna live with you till the end!! .. and beyond.. ;)!!! * Even a dent in the universe.. can't express my Love for you! My life is yours forever.. O girl, O girl.. O girl.. you be mine!! Not just for this time.. Everyday beyond.. Valentine, O O my heart, be my.. Valentine!

Human society has surrendered for seventy centuries to corrupt laws and is no longer able to perceive the true meaning of the sublime, primary, and eternal codes of behaviour. Human vision has become accustomed to looking at the light of feeble candles and can no longer stare at the light of the sun. Each generation has inherited the psychological diseases and maladies of the others, and so these have become universal. They have become attributes inseparable from humanity, so that people no longer look upon them as diseases but consider them natural and noble qualities revealed by God to Adam. And when a person appears among them who lacks these traits, they see that individual as flawed and deprived of spiritual perfections. ... They reckon the upright as criminals and those with self respect as rebels.

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

You begin to notice what it is that makes this person a teacher, beyond the limits of his individuality and personality. Thus the principle of the “universality of the guru” comes into the picture as well. Every problem you face in life is a part of your marriage. Whenever you experience difficulties, you hear the words of the guru. This is the point at which one begins to gain one’s independence from the guru as lover, because every situation becomes an expression of the teachings. First you surrendered to your spiritual friend. Then you communicated and played games with him. And now you have come to the state of complete openness. As a result of this openness you begin to see the guru-quality in every life-situation, that all situations in life offer you the opportunity to be as open as you are with the guru, and so all things can become the guru.

surrender is the glad and voluntary acknowledgment that there is a God and it is not me. His purposes are often wiser and better than our desires. Jesus does not come to rearrange the outside of our life the way we want. He comes to rearrange the inside of our life the way God wants. In surrender, I let go of my life. It is a Copernican revolution of the soul in which I take myself out of the center of the universe and place God there. I yield to Him. I offer obedience. I do what he says.

Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience -- that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible -- that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the seconds destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

We have to be willing to become vulnerable to trust Him if we wish to find security and satisfaction in Him. We have to be willing to let go of what little we have, to gain the great riches and supreme happiness He has to offer. And we have to let Him have the helm if we wish to hear the sweeter song. The "something better" is found in emptying yourself, surrendering to his lead, letting go of your life and all you hold dear, and entrusting everything to Him. Because in doing that, you will be tenderly embraced by the sweetest Musician in all the universe and receive your own personal concert. [see Luke 9:23]

He’d learned that what besets the eye is often a mirage, and that there exists a grander truth beyond the world of appearances; one of which the mind can only access when it surrenders the inexplicable to the imagination, a force he’d learned was far more powerful than every last assembled star across the universe.

When you’re accustomed to loneliness, you become in tune with the rhythms of yourself and your own mind—because you always have to answer yourself at the end of the day, to be alone with your thoughts. You’ll also know how important self-love and reliance is, to love yourself before you love someone else, but I think the universality of loneliness teaches us what that love is. To be lonely is to be human, to feel pain, to be forced to know yourself—and the universality of it binds us. Love is embracing that universality and surrendering to it. It’s looking out at a lonely universe and knowing it’s fabric makes you who you are.

I have told myself over and over that I must get out of this house, that I have stumbled upon a place where dreams walk by daylight and that those dreams may destroy me. But there’s the money, and I have been so poor for so long. There is a terrible fascination, too. I am a scholar or I am nothing, Millie. I knew an elderly Jewish scholar at the University of Chicago, a Dr. Kopecky. He was robbed on the street, and surrendered his wallet and his watch without a struggle; but when the gang of juveniles who had surrounded him tried to take his bag, containing one old book and his notes, he fought them all. Perhaps you understand.

When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years.

But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

Want me to say it? Want me to confess what makes me an actual felon and reserves me a choice spot in hell?” “Please, Alexandria Patra,” Preton said, “tell me all your regrets.” Her eyes narrowed. “I taught children to surrender their developing minds to concepts like the greater good or the good of society which can’t exist in any form in this world without actual kids being trampled underneath their untouchable banners.” Pointing at her own chest, she added, “I taught children that in order to live up to those ‘higher’ ideals they must be obedient—to others, must sacrifice their dreams—to the needs of others. I taught them it was more important to be a part of a group than to stand on their own judgment. I told the non-conforming kids they should feel guilty for wanting to live on their own terms.” Alexa swept a hand forward, pointing it at Preton. “I then delivered every ego-stripped, dream-crushed child to the power mongers of the world like you, who will use this universally accepted mirage of morality to control them.

You're a mountain searching for it's echo! Whenever you hurt, you say, Lord God! The answer lives in that which bends you low and makes you cry out. Pain and the threat of death, for instance, do this. They make you clear. When they're gone, you lose purpose. You wonder what to do, where to go. This is because you're uneven in your opening: sometimes closed and unreachable, sometimes, with your shirt torn with longing. Your discursive intellect dominates for a time; then the universal, beyond-time intelligence comes. Sell your questioning talents, my son; buy bewildering surrender. Live simply and helpfully in that. Don't worry about the University of Bukhara with its prestigious curriculum.

commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn shocked his audience by suggesting that “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion” was not attractive to those living in Russia. “It is time, in the West,” Solzhenitsyn said, “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” The triumph of rights over obligations had resulted in a destructive and irresponsible freedom, leading to “the abyss of human decadence.” He criticized the “misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror,” which illustrated the surrender of the West to the corrosion of evil. “The problem at the root of the West’s malaise,” Solzhenitsyn explained, was rooted in the “rationalistic humanism” of the so-called Enlightenment:

And what does the text inform us about the content of discipleship? Follow me, run along behind me! That is all. To follow in his steps is something which is void of all content. It gives us no intelligible programme for a way of life, no goal or ideal to strive after. It is not a cause which human calculation might deem worthy of our devotion, even the devotion of ourselves. What happens? At the call, Levi leaves all that he has--but not because he thinks that he might be doing something worth while, but simply for the sake of the call. Otherwise he cannot follow in the steps of Jesus. This act on Levi's part has not the slightest value in itself, it is quite devoid of significance and unworthy of consideration. This disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out, and has to forsake his old life in order that he may "exist" in the strictest sense of the word. The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity (that is, in truth, into the absolute security and safety of the fellowship of Jesus), from a life which is observable and calculable (it is, in fact, quite incalculable) into a life where everything is unobservable and fortuitous (that is, into one which is necessary and calculable), out of the realm of finite (which is in truth the infinite) into the realm of infinite possibilities (which is the one liberating reality). Again it is no universal law. Rather is it the exact opposite of all legality. It is nothing else than bondage to Jesus Christ alone, completely breaking through every programme, every ideal, every set of laws. No other significance is possible, since Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters.

To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: 'the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence'. Music and silence - how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell - though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express- no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise - Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile - Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.

It really makes no difference what sadhana you practice, whether you practice Zen, or Taoism, or mystical Christianity, or Cabala. What you practice makes no difference. But what are you doing with the practice? Are you really diving deep within yourself and finding your own reality? Or are you still reading many books, going to many lectures, becoming totally confused? Leave the world alone. Do not try to correct the world. When I say correct the world, I mean correct people, places or things. Everything has a tendency to balance itself. There are certain laws in this universe that take care of itself. There’s a power and a presence that knows the way, and you are told to surrender to this power, to this presence. Complete surrender. Not my will, but thine. This is the highest teaching of any system. When you give up your ego, totally surrender, and allow the powers that be to direct you, and guide you, and take care of you and unfold as you, everything will work out.

Now, even though it be neither necessity nor caprice, history, for the authentic reactionary, is not, for all that, an interior dialectic of the immanent will, but rather a temporal adventure between man and that which transcends him. His labors are traces, on the disturbed sand, of the body of a beast and the aura of an angel. History is a tatter, torn from man’s freedom, waving in the breath of destiny. Man cannot be silent because his liberty is not merely a sanctuary where he escapes from deadening routine and takes refuge in order to become his own master. But in the free act the radical does not attain possession of his essence. Liberty is not an abstract possibility of choosing among known goods, but rather the concrete condition in which we are granted the possession of new goods. Freedom is not a momentary judgement between conflicting instincts, but rather the summit from which man contemplates the ascent of new stars among the luminous dust of the starry sky. Liberty places man among prohibitions that are not physical and imperatives that are not vital. The free moment dispels the unreal brightness of the day, in order that the motion of the universe which slides its fleeting lights over the shuddering of our flesh might rise up on the horizon of our soul. If the progressive casts himself into the future, and the conservative into the past, the authentic reactionary does not measure his anxiety with the history of yesterday or with the history of tomorrow. He does not extol what the new dawn might bring, nor is he terrified by the last shadows of the night. His spirit rises up to a space where the essential accosts him with its immortal presence. One escapes the slavery of history by pursuing in the wildness of the world the traces of divine footsteps. Man and his deeds are a vital but servile and mortal flesh that breathes gusts from beyond the mountains. To be reactionary is to champion causes that do not turn up on the notice board of history, causes where losing does not matter. It is to know that we only discover what we think we invent; to admit that our imagination does not create, but only lays bare smooth surfaces. It is not to espouse settled cases, nor to plead for determined conclusions, but rather to submit our will to the necessity that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the exigency that does not compel; it is to find sleeping certainties that guide us to the edge of ancient pools. The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a canceled past, but rather a seeker of sacred shades upon eternal hills.

In order to become a willing participant, you have to know what it means to be an unwilling participant. An unwilling participant is one who is attempting to avoid the gravity of surrender, who is negotiating with life instead of opening to it. In the old spiritual paradigm, it would be seen as a form of contemplation. But in order for true insight to dawn, we must ask how our lives are only changing us for the better with no further negotiations in mind. Within this Golden Rule is the opportunity to discover meditation from a different perspective. Oftentimes, when we try to meditate, we likely find a quiet space, close our eyes, and begin negotiating for more preferable circumstances. Meditation is not negotiation. Meditation is what happens when negotiation dissolves. Negotiating with life is to assume that what’s happening is a mistake. Remember Golden Rule #6, “the Universe always has a plan”? If the Universe always has a plan, then any form of negotiating could only veer you off your highest path. When you are embodying this Golden Rule, you are cultivating the soul’s attribute of stillness. The ego lives to negotiate, but the ego isn’t capable of being still. This is why if your ego is attempting to meditate, it’s likely an internal negotiation with the beauty of empty space.

You are the only one who can do this. That’s the ultimately challenging and profoundly liberating truth you discover in Evolutionary Enlightenment. Any individual who is committed to this path has to know, at the deepest level, that he or she is the only one who could possibly do this. And that is because there is no other. You have discovered that fact, directly, for yourself. From the absolute or nondual perspective that emerges in spiritual revelation, there is only ONE. There literally is no other; there is only One without a second. To truly understand conscious evolution, you must grapple with the profound implications of that fact. I believe we can only consciously evolve to the degree that we have realized at the deepest level of our being that we are that One without a second. In an evolutionary context, facing into the truth of nonduality—that the many is the One and that the One is ultimately who we always are—forces a confrontation with any relationship to the life process that is less than whole, complete, and fully committed. To consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. That One without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that One, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future. Of course, in this manifest dimension, where the One is expressed through the many, those of us who have awakened to our repsonsibility for the process then begin to engage in this heroic endeavor together. But each individual has to be willing to be the One. This is the spiritual physics of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It works only if each one of us knows without a doubt that I am solely responsible. And nothing puts greater pressure on the separate self-sense than that.

In his book 'God and the Universe of Faiths,' British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe - and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together. Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it. The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

If he surrendered the advantage of the gun he would find himself floating in the gutters of an inhuman world, a part of the daily flotsam and jetsam of a hundred thousand abortions whooshing down the wormhole drain, drowning in a sea of pus-streaked semen and warm piss and menstrual juice and dead fetuses and radiator fluid and bloody diarrhea, seeking refuge inside the cathedral ruins of an embryonic sac, curling up to say his prayers then whispering goodnight, God speed, good riddance, gadzooks, the sac shrinking, disappearing into the frigid, humpbacked void of sodomized angels, wingless now, lecherous gargoyles sporting skeletal appendages without feathers, it would be a birth in reverse, the collapse of the universal soul. He wasn't sure how to save himself.

I had better come clean now and say that I do not believe that art (all art) and beauty are ever separate, nor do I believe that either art or beauty are optional in a sane society." "That puts me on the side of what Harold Bloom calls 'the ecstasy of the privileged moment. Art, all art, as insight, as transformation, as joy. Unlike Harold Bloom, I really believe that human beings can be taught to love what they do not love already and that the privileged moment exists for all of us, if we let it. Letting art is the paradox of active surrender. I have to work for art if I want art to work on me." (...) We know that the universe is infinite, expanding and strangely complete, that it lacks nothing we need, but in spite of that knowledge, the tragic paradigm of human life is lack, loss, finality, a primitive doomsaying that has not been repealed by technology or medical science. The arts stand in the way of this doomsaying. Art objects. The nouns become an active force not a collector's item. Art objects. "The cave wall paintings at Lascaux, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the huge truth of a Picasso, the quieter truth of Vanessa Bell, are part of the art that objects to the lie against life, against the spirit, that is pointless and mean. The message colored through time is not lack, but abundance. Not silence but many voices. Art, all art, is the communication cord that cannot be snapped by indifference or disaster. Against the daily death it does not die." "Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed. If, in the comfortable West, we have chosen to treat such energies with scepticism and contempt, then so much the worse for us. "Art is not a little bit of evolution that late-twentieth-century city dwellers can safely do without. Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, surviving, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art. "If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?

I don't know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see …

Paley’s book Boys and Girls is about the year she spent trying to get her pupils to behave in a more unisex way. And it is a chronicle of spectacular and amusing failure. None of Paley’s tricks or bribes or clever manipulations worked. For instance, she tried forcing the boys to play in the doll corner and the girls to play in the block corner. The boys proceeded to turn the doll corner into the cockpit of a starship, and the girls built a house out of blocks and resumed their domestic fantasies. Paley’s experiment culminated in her declaration of surrender to the deep structures of gender. She decided to let the girls be girls. She admits, with real self-reproach, that this wasn’t that hard for her: Paley always approved more of the girls’ relatively calm and prosocial play. It was harder to let the boys be boys, but she did. “Let the boys be robbers,” Paley concluded, “or tough guys in space. It is the natural, universal, and essential play of little boys.” I’ve been arguing that children’s pretend play is relentlessly focused on trouble. And it is. But as Melvin Konner demonstrates in his monumental book The Evolution of Childhood, there are reliable sex differences in how boys and girls play that have been found around the world. Dozens of studies across five decades and a multitude of cultures have found essentially what Paley found in her midwestern classroom: boys and girls spontaneously segregate themselves by sex; boys engage in much more rough-and-tumble play; fantasy play is more frequent in girls, more sophisticated, and more focused on pretend parenting; boys are generally more aggressive and less nurturing than girls, with the differences being present and measurable by the seventeenth month of life. The psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer sum up this research: “Most of the time we see clear-cut differences in the way children play. Generally, boys are more vigorous in their activities, choosing games of adventure, daring, and conflict, while girls tend to choose games that foster nurturance and affiliation.

In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered.

It is not the nobility of rebellion that illuminates the world today, but nihilism. And it is the consequences of nihilism that we must retrace, without losing sight of the truth innate in its origins. Even if God existed, Ivan would never surrender to Him in the face of the injustice done to man. But a longer contemplation of this injustice, a more bitter approach, transformed the "even if you exist" into "you do not deserve to exist," therefore "you do not exist." The victims have found in their own innocence the justification for the final crime. Convinced of their condemnation and without hope of immortality, they decided to murder God. If it is false to say that from that day began the tragedy of contemporary man, neither is it true to say that there was where it ended. On the contrary, this attempt indicates the highest point in a drama that began with the end of the ancient world and of which the final words have not yet been spoken. From this moment, man decides to exclude himself from grace and to live by his own means. Progress, from the time of Sade up to the present day, has consisted in gradually enlarging the stronghold where, according to his own rules, man without God brutally wields power. In defiance of the divinity, the frontiers of this stronghold have been gradually extended, to the point of making the entire universe into a fortress erected against the fallen and exiled deity. Man, at the culmination of his rebellion, incarcerated himself; from Sade's lurid castle to the concentration camps, man's greatest liberty consisted only in building the prison of his crimes. But the state of siege gradually spreads, the demand for freedom wants to embrace all mankind. Then the only kingdom that is opposed to the kingdom of grace must be founded —namely, the kingdom of justice—and the human community must be reunited among the debris of the fallen City of God. To kill God and to build a Church are the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion. Absolute freedom finally becomes a prison of absolute duties, a collective asceticism, a story to be brought to an end. The nineteenth century, which is the century of rebellion, thus merges into the twentieth, the century of justice and ethics, in which everyone indulges in self-recrimination.

In love, in other words, those phases are present, in its content, which we cited as the fundamental essence of the absolute Spirit: the reconciled return out of another into self. By being the other in which the spirit remains communing with itself, this other can only be spiritual over again, a spiritual personality. The true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self, yet in this surrender and oblivion having and possessing oneself alone. This reconciliation of the spirit with itself and the completion of itself to a totality is the Absolute, yet not, as may be supposed, in the sense that the Absolute as a purely singular and therefore finite subject coincides with itself in another finite subject; on the contrary, the content of the subjectivity which reconciles itself with itself in another is here the Absolute itself: the Spirit which only in another spirit is the knowing and willing of itself as the Absolute and has the satisfaction of this knowledge. In love, on the contrary, the spirit’s opposite is not nature but itself a spiritual consciousness, another person, and the spirit is therefore realized for itself in what it itself owns, in its very own element. So in this affirmative satisfaction and blissful reality at rest in itself, love is the ideal but purely spiritual beauty which on account of its inwardness can also be expressed only in and as the deep feeling of the heart. For the spirit which is present to itself and immediately sure of itself in [another] spirit, and therefore has the spiritual itself as the material and ground of its existence, is in itself, is depth of feeling, and, more precisely, is the spiritual depth of love. (α) God is love and therefore his deepest essence too is to be apprehended and represented in this form adequate to art in Christ. But Christ is divine love; as its object, what is manifest is on the one hand God himself in his invisible essence, and, on the other, mankind which is to be redeemed; and thus what then comes into appearance in Christ is less the absorption of one person in another limited person than the Idea of love in its universality, the Absolute, the spirit of truth in the element and form of feeling. With this universality of love’s object, love’s expression is also universalized, with the result that the subjective concentration of heart and soul does not become the chief thing in that expression – just as, even in the case of the Greeks, what is emphasized, although in a totally different context, in Venus Urania[8] and the old Titanic deity, Eros, is the universal Idea and not the subjective element, i.e. individual shape and feeling. Only when Christ is conceived in the portrayals of romantic art as more than an individual subject, immersed in himself, does the expression of love become conspicuous in the form of subjective deep feeling, always elevated and borne, however, by the universality of its content.

The contemporary Christian Church, precisely, has understood them in this' 'wrong way, to the letter, 'like the Jews,' exoterically, not esoterically. Nevertheless to say 'like the Jews' is an error. One would have to say 'as the Jews want.' Because they also possess an exotericism, for their masses, represented by the Torah and Talmud, and an esotericism, in the Cabala (which means: 'Received Tradition'), in the Zohar ('brightness'), the Merkaba or Chariot being the most secret part of the Cabala which only initiated rabbis know and use as the powerful tool of their magic. We have already said that the Cabala reached them from elsewhere, like everything else, in the Middle Ages, even though they tell us otherwise, using and transforming it in concordance with their Archetype. The Hasidim, from Poland, represent an exclusively esoteric sect of Judaism. Islam also has its esoteric magic, represented by Sufism and the sect of the Assassins, Hassanists, oflran. They interpret the Koran symbolically. And it was because of contact with this sect of the 'Old Man of the Mountain' that the Templars felt compelled to secede more and more from the direction of Rome, centering themselves in their Esoteric Kristianity and Mystery of the Gral. This was also why Rome destroyed them, like the esoteric Cathars (katharos = pure in Greek), the Bogomils, the Manichees and the gnostics. In the Church of Rome, called Catholic, there only remains a soulless ritual of the Mass, as a liturgical shell that no longer reaches the Symbol, which no longer touches it, no longer puts it into action. The Nordic contribution has been lost, destroyed by prejudice and the ethnological persecution of Nordicism, Germanism and the complete surrender to Judaism. Zen Buddhism preserves the esotericism of Buddha. In Japan Shinto and Zen are practiced by a racially superior warrior caste, the Samurai. The most esoteric side of Hinduism is found in Tantrism, especially in the Kaula or Kula Order. So understood, esotericism is what goes beyond the exterior form and the masses, the physical, and puts an elite in contact with invisible superior forces. In my case, the condition that paralysed me in the midst of dreaming and left me without means to influence the phenomena. The visible is symbol of invisible forces (Archetypes, Gods). By means of an esoteric knowledge, of an initiation in this knowledge, a hierarchic minority can make contact with these invisible forces, being able to act on the Symbol, dynamizing and controlling the physical phenomena that incarnate them. In my case: to come to control the involuntary process which, without knowing how, was controlling me, to be able to guide it, to check or avoid it. Jung referred to this when he said 'if someone wisely faces the Archetype, in whatever place in the world, he acquires universal validity because the Archetype is one and indivisible'. And the means to reach this spiritual world, 'on the other side of the mirror,' is Magic, Rite, Ritual, Ceremony. All religions have possessed them, even the Christian, as we have said. And the Rite is not something invented by humans but inspired by 'those from beyond,' Jung would say by the Collective Unconscious.

You’re right: if there’s sentient life behind the border, it probably won’t share my goals. Unlike the people in this room, who all want exactly the same things in life as I do, and have precisely the same tastes in food, art, music, and sex. Unlike the people of Schur, and Cartan, and Zapata — who I came here in the hope of protecting, after losing my own home — who doubtless celebrate all the same festivals, delight in the same songs and stories, and gather every fortieth night to watch actors perform the same plays, in the same language, from the same undisputed canon, as the people I left behind. “If there’s sentient life behind the border, of course we couldn’t empathize with it. These creatures are unlikely to possess cute mammalian neonate faces, or anything else we might mistake for human features. None of us could have the imagination to get over such insurmountable barriers, or the wit to apply such difficult abstractions as the General Intelligence theorem — though since every twelve-year-old on my home world was required to master that result, it must be universally known on this side of the border. “You’re right: we should give up responsibility for making any difficult moral judgments, and surrender to the dictates of natural selection. Evolution cares so much about our happiness that no one who’s obeyed an inherited urge has ever suffered a moment’s regret for it. History is full of joyful case studies of people who followed their natural instincts at every opportunity — fucking whoever they could, stealing whatever they could, destroying anything that stood in their way — and the verdict is unanimous: any behavior that ever helped someone disseminate their genes is a recipe for unalloyed contentment, both for the practitioners, and for everyone around them.