Archive for the ‘Personalities’ Category
Friday, January 9th, 2009
Abhishiktananda’s as a path of introversion and Merton’s path of extroversion
Both Abhishiktananda and Merton pioneered attempts to introduce spiritual dialogue between Hinduism and Christianity. Both lived monastic lives and both were compelled to go physically and mentally to the East to study eastern religion. Both asked themselves in deeply serious ways: are religions of the east and west divergent or convergent ways to God?
Abhishiktananda
Abhishiktananda’s path was one of introversion or reserve. He holds his fire verbally and works with everything internally. His hermitages were the “not-doings” of silent renunciation. He is relatively unknown by the World. You can see the inward focus clearly in his physiognomy; his eyes.
Thomas Merton
Merton’s path was one of extroversion or expression. While initially he spent much time in solitude and isolation. He later emerged to write 70 books and is considered by many to be an influential American spiritual writer. He took up socially controversial issues of race relations, violence, nuclear war and economic injustice as a part of his spiritual concern and gave lectures at gatherings of world leaders. He felt compelled to act.
Seeing these two personalities as being on paths of introversion and extroversion helps me to understand a real distinction in personalities.
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: “for my sake was the world created,” and in his left: ” I am dust and ashes.”
From Ten Rungs, Hasidic Sayings Collected and Edited by Martin Buber
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
I find this quote from Buber interesting. It’s compelling in its immediacy and seems to me despairing but true. Of course it all depends on who you think God is and whether you ignore (or take issue with) the masculine pronouns used for God.
Let Everyone Cry Out to God
“Let everyone cry out to God and lift his heart up to him, as if he were hanging by a hair, and a tempest were raging to the very heart of heaven, and he were at a loss for what to do, and there were hardly time to cry out. It is a time when no counsel, indeed, can help a man and he has no refuge save to remain in his loneliness and lift his eyes and his heart up to God, and cry out to him. And this should be done at all times, for in the world a man is in great danger.”
From Ten Rungs, Hasidic Sayings Collected and Edited by Martin Buber
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
“In every man there is something precious, which is in no one else. And so we should honor each for what is hidden within him, for what only he has, and none of his comrades.”
Ten Rungs, Hasidic Sayings - Collected and Edited by Martin Buber
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Resemble again the tree which you love, the broad-branched one — silently and attentively it hangs over the sea.
from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
From Thus Spake Zarathustra
“Around the devisers of new values revolves to world: – - invisible it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory; such is the course of things.”
“Valuing is creating: hear it you creating ones! Valuation itself is the treasure and jewel of the valued things. Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the nut of existence would
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
“To paint a tree green is not true painting for the reason that however well one imitates her, nature is still the essential thing; nature is still more beautiful, more vital; it needs no copy. A real painter never imitates. He uses an object as a recipient or focus of the sun, or to observe a color reflex in that object’s surroundings, or to catch, above it, an interweaving of light and darkness. In other words, the thing painted is merely an inducement. For example, we never paint a flower standing in front of a window; we paint the light which, shining in at the window, is seen through the flower. We paint the sun’s colored light; catch the sun.”
“The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory-disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness.”
Rudolf Steiner
The Arts and Their Mission Chpr 6
First Goetheanum, designed by Steiner
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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
In taking responsibility for an action, we are not really taking responsibility for the action as an action. We assume responsibility for that which makes the action our action. And that is not the motive, which is the cognition of things outside us, but the character, which is our own very inner being.
Responsibility involves the satisfaction or regret, as the case may be, over the fact that one is who one is, that one has the character that one has, as revealed in the things one did provided certain motives.
Implicit in the feeling is the recognition that one would have acted differently had one been a different individual – a being with a different character.
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