United States or Sri Lanka ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In other words, I set each sentence down without anxiety as to how it will fit into the whole; for I know it has all sprung from a single foundation. It is thus that an organic whole originates, and that alone will live.... Chance, thou ruler of this sense-world! Let me live and find peace for yet a few years, for I love my work as the mother her child.
This message from the spiritual world was received into men’s hearts, and permeated feeling and emotion; but it was not possible to bridge the gulf between this state of devotion and what human intelligence, concentrated on the sense-world, was learning in the sphere of physical existence.
Just as stone, masses of earth, and like materials make up the solid land—the continental region of the world of sense—so do the structures described above compose the solid land of the spiritual world. All that is life in the sense-world belongs to the ocean-region of the spiritual world. To the physical eye, life appears in its effects in plants, animals, and men.
The origin of the sense-world is conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a falling away, which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary.
Enough has been said to stamp Ruskin as a reader in the book of nature, capable of deciphering the signature of the spirit in the phenomena of the sense-world. Outwardly different from Ruskin's and yet spiritually comparable, is the contribution made by his older contemporary, Luke Howard, to the foundation of a science of nature based on intuition.
He is transplanted out of it into this one, which offers only outer sense-observation and the intelligence connected with it. By every possible means these people strove to open up a view of the real world. They could take no interest in the illusory sense-world, or at any rate only so far as it proved to be a veil for the supersensible.
Only when we have a preconceived idea of what we “wish to see,” are we unable to experience this feeling. In that case we may consider as nothing what is, in reality, of immeasurable importance. But one should observe minutely everything which one experiences while practicing,—experiences which are so fundamentally different from those of the sense-world.
Since the coming of Christ, those who attain to the Mystery of Christ are able to take with them into the spiritual world what they have won in the physical. And from the spiritual world it then flows back again into the earthly sense-world, since reincarnated souls, on re-entering earth-life, bring with them what the Christ-impulse between death and a new birth, has bestowed.
Immediacy of approach to certain essentials of nature as a result of their religious or artistic experience of the sense-world, is the characteristic of two more representatives of British cultural life. Like those discussed in the previous chapter they can be of especial help to us in our attempt to establish an up-to-date method of apprehending nature's phenomena through reading them.
Having once caught a glimpse of this higher self, man feels a tremendous temptation to look upon it in the same manner in which he is accustomed to regard the things of the physical sense-world. And yet this temptation is salutary; it is indeed necessary, if man’s development is to proceed in the right manner.
Word Of The Day