The life of the spirit may be fairly
represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment. At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944)


Thursday, September 5, 2013

The Upanishads ( उपनिषद् circa 600 B.C.)


      Isa Upanishad


Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth. Leaving the transient, find joy in the Eternal:  set not your heart on another's possession.  

The Spirit moves and moves not. He is far, and he is near.  He is within all, and he is outside all.  

Who sees all beings in his own Self, 
and his own Self in all beings loses all fear.  

When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him?  

The Spirit filled all with his radiance. He is incorporeal and invulnerable, 
pure and untouched by evil. He is the Supreme seer and thinker, 
immanent and transcendent. He placed all things in the path of Eternity.  

He who knows both the transcendent and the immanent, with the immanent overcomes death and with the transcendent reaches immortality.  

The face of truth remains hidden behind a circle of gold. 
Unveil it, O god of light, that I who love the true may see!  

O life-giving sun, off-spring of the Lord of creation, 
solitary seer of heaven! Spread thy light and withdraw 
thy blinding splendour that I may behold my radiant form: 
that Spirit far away within thee is my own inmost Spirit.  

May life go to immortal life, and the body go to ashes, 
OM. O my soul, remember past strivings, remember! 
O my soul, remember past strivings, remember!  




(The Upanishads, translated 
from the Sanskrit by Juan Mascaró, 
Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1965, pp. 50-51)



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