You think that the world can be conquered by your own
efforts. When you are frustrated externally and are driven
inwards you feel, ‘Oh, there is a power higher than man.’ The
ego is a very powerful elephant which cannot be brought under
control by any creature less powerful than a lion, which, in
this instance, is none other than the Guru/Atman, whose very looks
make the elephant-like ego tremble and die. You will know in
due course that your glory lies where you cease to exist. In
order to gain that state, you should surrender yourself. Then
the master sees that you are in a fit state to receive guidance
and He guides you.
(Sri Ramana Maharshi)
Lord, said David, since you do not need us,
why did you create these two worlds?
Reality replied: O prisoner of time,
I was a secret treasure of kindness and generosity,
and I wished this treasure to be known,
so I created a mirror: its shining face, the heart;
its darkened back, the world;
The back would please you if you’ve never seen the face.
(Rumi)
“Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
(John 1:50)
So long as you seek Self-realisation, the Guru is
necessary. Guru is the Self/Atman. Take Guru to be the real Self, and
yourself to be the individual self. The disappearance of this sense
of duality is the removal of ignorance. So long as duality persists
in you, the Guru is necessary. Because you identify yourself
with the body, you think the Guru too is the body. You are not
the body, nor is the Guru. You are the Self and so is the Guru.
This knowledge is gained by what you call Self-realisation.
(Sri Ramana Maharshi)
Then, the grand old man of the Kuru dynasty, the glorious patriarch Bheeshma, roared like a lion, and blew his conch shell very loudly, giving joy to Duryodhan.
Thereafter, conches, kettledrums, bugles, trumpets, and horns suddenly blared forth, and their combined sound was overwhelming.
(Bhagavad Gita 1:12-13)
To put the old names to work, or even Just to leave them in circulation,
will always, of course, involve some risk: the risk of settling down or of
regressing into the system that has been, or is in the process of being,
deconstructed. To deny this risk would be to confirm it: it would be to see
the signifier-in this case the name-as a merely circumstantial , conventional
occurrence of the concept or as a concession without any specific
effect. It would be an affirmation of the autonomy of meaning, of the ideal
puri ty of an abstract, theoretical history of the concept. Inversely, to claim
to do away immediately with previous marks and to cross over, by decree,
by a simple leap, into the outside of the classical oppositions is, apart from
the risk of engaging in an interminable “negative theology,” to forget that
these oppositions have never constituted a given system, a sort of ahistorical,
thoroughly homogeneous table, but rather a dissymmetric, hierarchically
ordered space whose closure is constantly being traversed by the forces, and
worked by the exteriority, that it represses: that is, expels and, which
amounts to the same, internalizes as one of its moments.
(Derrida)
Then, from amidst the Pandava army, seated in a glorious chariot drawn by white horses, Madhav and Arjun blew their Divine conch shells.
Hrishikesh blew his conch shell, called Panchajanya, and Arjun blew the Devadutta. Bheem, the voracious eater and performer of herculean tasks, blew his mighty conch, called Paundra.
(Bhagavad Gita 1:14-15)
Jesus sat humbly on the back of an ass, my child!
How could a zephyr ride an ass?
Spirit, find your way, in seeking lowness like a stream.
Reason, tread the path of selflessness into eternity.
Remember God so much that you are forgotten.
Let the caller and the called disappear;
be lost in the Call.
(Rumi)