On Spiritual Awakening

Spiritual awakening is the waking up in you of that which is inspired.

Inspiration and happiness go together, because the breath of inspiration gives birth to the freedom of happiness.

Spiritual awakening is just like physical awakening.

Waking up is not caused by an alarm clock or by someone shaking you gently; it is caused by your having had enough sleep. The kind of awakening that comes from externals waking you up is unreliable - that is, if you depend only on the alarm clock, you generally end up sleeping in. The kind of awakening that comes from being ready to stop sleeping is stable and happy.

Just as waking up the body naturally is reliable, so waking up the spiritual naturally is best. In other words, it is best to avoid occult gyrations and mystifications which might just as well be dreams (or nightmares) as genuine presagers of awakening.

When it has had enough sleep, the body wakes. When they have had enough drama, the emotions become habitually stoic. When it has had enough thinking, the mind becomes silent.

Why make this a matter right or wrong when it is clearly a matter of ready or unready?

But the spirit becomes awake when it knows it is free. Freedom is the nature of the spirit, just as meat is the nature of the body and energy the nature of the emotions. The spirit that knows itself as free is happy. And being happy, it is awake.

Do spirits go back to sleep? Yes and no. A spiritual awakening is a personal quality which awakens in a specific person. That awake quality may be enhanced thoughtfulness and kindness; it may be a heightened dedication to a code of conduct; it may be a deepened sense of instutional or collective commitment; or it may take on the various mystical facets of selfless service, devotional feeling, or meditative solitude. But each awake quality is not better or worse than another. They are all awake to the person who experiences that quality. So, to answer the question of whether spirits go back to sleep: no, because there are different kinds of awakening suitable to different types of people, therefore what to one person is a state of sleep is to another a glorious awakening; but yes, because kinds of awakening are different in degree, and while one is not better than another, some kinds of awakenings are more complete and rich, as judged by their results, than others.

What is your message?

Q: What is your message?



A1: The question is irrelevant. Love is the answer.

A2: My life is my message.

A3: Clarity is the love of truth, charity the truth of life: together they are the good.

A4: [insert reply here]

View from your deathbed

From your deathbed, what matters is that your final breath comes in with the sweet satisfaction of a life fulfilled and goes out with the blessing of a life complete.

- Gay Hendricks

America As the New Rome, by Mervyn F. Bendle

Blogger Comment: This superb, erudite, and sophisticated essay undermines the notion of the fall of Rome, only to reinstall a sophisticated moral vision of the role of nihilism and moral relativism in the downfall of civilizations. The fact that whole societies just lose interest in behaving decently is the real source of the shift in loyalties and interests which we, in retrospect, oversimplify as "the Fall of Rome". I highly recommend the journal it comes from, Quadrant, as Australia's leading cultural journal.

America as the New Rome
Mervyn F. Bendle

FOR AT LEAST 240 YEARS Western societies have been fascinated by two inter-related events, one located in the distant past, and the other in the near but ever-receding future: the fall of the Roman empire with its causes and consequences; and apocalyptic expectations about the fate of America and Western civilisation. Three new books, Cullen Murphy’s The New Rome?, Naomi Wolf’s The End of America, and Chalmers Johnson’s Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (all first published in America, but issued in Australia by Scribe), in various ways cater to (and indeed exploit) these perennial concerns. All three authors have publicised their books widely in Australia, through press, radio, television and internet interviews, or appearances at writers’ festivals. While none can be commended, they raise some interesting questions about the historical study of ancient Rome and its contemporary relevance, and also illuminate some important preoccupations of the Western intelligentsia.

In contemplating the end of empire, Murphy and Johnson are joining a long tradition, exemplified by Edward Gibbon, who has described the moment when he first thought to write his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789):

“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

In 1782, the Frenchman Count Volney described a similar reverie before the ruins of another ancient city that led him to write Ruins, or Considerations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791):

“Here once flourished an opulent city; here was the seat of a powerful empire … Ah, how has so much glory been eclipsed! How have been annihilated so many labours! Thus do perish the works of men! Thus vanish empires and nations!”

Meanwhile (c.1778–80), Johann Fuseli captured a similar moment in a drawing of the artist slumped in awe next to the gigantic fragments of the Colossus of Constantine found in the courtyard of the Capitoline Museums in Rome. Then, a century on, Gustave Doré drew a similar picture, envisaging a future imperial London lying in ruins before the awestruck artist. Now, a further 140 years later, Murphy records the same type of experience as he wandered about Washington DC:

“I doubt I’m the only person who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city below might appear as a ruin. [Great national edifices] invite you to see them as derelicts … What calamity could bring the capital to this condition? Earthquake, Pestilence? Pride?”

Murphy found himself impelled to emulate Gibbon—albeit writing in a prophetic rather than an historical mode—and explore America’s impending decline and fall, if such is to be its fate.

By contrast, Johnson displays little of this prophetic vision or sense of historical depth, but is rather a pugnacious and pragmatic polemicist, merely exploiting the fate of Rome to continue his left-wing assault on the US government and its policies that he launched in Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire in 2002.

Wolf, for her part, has also produced a polemic, indeed an hysterical and paranoid effusion that is concerned with comparing America not to Rome but rather to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in order to identify “parallels” that show how America is devolving into a terrorist superpower. Her book compiles these into a sort of “how-to” manual for constructing a fascist state: invoke an internal and external threat; establish secret prisons; develop a paramilitary force; place ordinary citizens under surveillance; infiltrate citizens’ groups; arbitrarily detain citizens; target key individuals; restrict the press; represent criticism as espionage and dissent as treason; and subvert the rule of law. Rome appears only as the scene of Mussolini’s activities and Wolf’s book is best treated as an example of the strong apocalyptic tendency in American culture. It is also an example of the reckless, adversarial nature of the intelligentsia, to which we will return later.

Underlying Murphy’s book is the conviction that “the debate over Rome’s ultimate fate holds a key to thinking about our own”. In the American title of the book he asks of Americans: Are we Rome? And can Americans learn anything of contemporary relevance from the achievements, failures, weaknesses and fate of Rome? He himself is clearly convinced that Americans (and their allies and enemies) can indeed learn something, and (like Wolf) he identifies a set of “parallels” that allegedly exist between Rome and America, and he explores these in the chapters of his book: (1) A sense of imperial destiny and arrogance that tends to view the world as if it revolves around the imperial capital, be it Rome or Washington; (2) The enormous military power that underpins empire but increasingly comes to rely not on a professional army of citizens but on barbarians (Rome) and mercenaries (America); (3) A blurring of the distinction between public and private wealth and an associated tendency to privatise public assets that Murphy claims is inextricably linked to corruption; (4) An ethnocentrism shared by Rome and America that arises out of their dominance and leads them to disparage and underestimate the people beyond their frontiers; (5) The role of borders, which, Murphy claims, reveals a centuries-long Roman capacity to assimilate newcomers that America apparently cannot emulate; (6) Finally, Murphy identifies “the complexity parallel”, according to which, he claims, “the bigger the entity and the more things it touches, the more susceptible it is to forces beyond its control. Maintaining stability requires far more work than fomenting instability.”

These themes give Murphy’s book its structure, but right away there are problems. To begin with, some of the arguments are trivial, for example, the claim that Rome was ethnocentric and arrogant because it produced maps, arranged road markers, and erected monuments that placed it at the centre, as if it was conceivable that Romans would have sensibly orientated themselves in any other way at the time. And one suspects that these parallels could be drawn with many countries, including China throughout much of its history. Moreover, some of Murphy’s “parallels” seem obviously contrived, as if they have been chosen mainly to ensure the relevance of Murphy’s discussion to current political issues and preoccupations in America in the current presidential election year, rather than to explore authentically and systematically the true points of contact and divergence between Rome and the USA.

Johnson’s approach is similar, although he has a more limited agenda, using the example of ancient Rome to attack what he sees as American imperialism and militarism, which he insists will lead to catastrophe: “The collapse of the Roman Republic offers a perfect case study of how imperialism and militarism can undermine even the best defences of a democracy.”


ATTENTIVE READERS might notice that although Johnson invokes Gibbon and his explanation for the fall of the Roman empire, and also seeks to incorporate into his argument the fate of the British empire, he actually seems to focus on the Roman republic, which is conventionally taken to have ended with the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, whereas the end of the empire is usually given as 476 AD, when the last emperor of the western Roman empire, Romulus Augustus, was deposed and not replaced—half a millennium later.

Such readers might have even more pressing concerns—concerns that strike at the very heart of this type of polemical exploitation of the history of ancient Rome. Clearly, for such polemics to have any cogency two conditions need to be met: first, Rome needs really to have suffered a precipitous decline and fall; and, second, this needs to have happened for the reasons that the polemicists claim, otherwise their strategy of drawing close parallels between ancient Rome and contemporary America loses whatever power it might have.

Therefore, we must ask, what was the fate of Rome? Did Rome really “fall” sometime around the fifth century, as we have come to accept since Gibbon published his volumes of the Decline and Fall? Or did something else happen to it? And if it did fall, what were the causes? And were they primarily internal (for example, decadence or militarism), or external (barbarian invasions)? And do such questions really have anything to teach us across a gulf of 1500 years?

These are clearly substantial matters that illustrate the complex issues with which exercises in comparative history have to deal, and Murphy and Johnson generally avoid discussing them. Therefore, in order that we can more fully assess the type of arguments advanced in these books, we will review what Gibbon himself had to say about the fall of Rome, before more briefly reviewing some subsequent theories, including the great competing analysis proposed by Henri Pirenne in Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937), and the findings of the most recent historians of Rome. Ironically, Murphy and Johnson have chosen to launch their jeremiads at a propitious time for the study of Roman history. As Peter Heather (The Fall of the Roman Empire, 2005) points out: “Two generations of scholarship since the Second World War have revolutionized our understanding both of the Roman Empire and of the wider [barbarian] world … The intellectual impact of these [research] trends has been electric.”

Other historians before Gibbon had explored the idea of civilisational collapse. For example, Edward Wortley Montagu had published Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics in 1759. Nevertheless, it was Gibbon who gave it brilliant and memorable expression. In Chapter 38 of The Decline and Fall (D.M. Low abridgement), Gibbon offers his “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West”, concluding that:

“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.”

These are, of course, memorable words, capturing the essential themes that have ever since been associated with Gibbon’s analysis of the fall of Rome and the fate of empires. They suggest, for example, that “immoderate greatness” leads naturally and inevitably to decline, that there is a “principle of decay” inherent in civilisations, and that such immense human achievements can precipitously collapse under “the pressure of [their] own weight”. These observations have the quality of general predictions about the history of civilisations and certainly helped provoke the subsequent interest in the fall of Rome, treated as a case study of “immoderate greatness”, as, of course, we are seeing once again with these efforts by Murphy and Johnson.

However, before Gibbon reaches this famous assessment of Rome’s fall he offers an equally grand encomium of its achievements, especially in its earlier centuries, invoking the great Greek historian Polybius, who had witnessed Rome’s annihilation of Carthage and whose work revealed “the deep foundations of the greatness of Rome”:

“The fidelity of the citizens to each other and to the state was confirmed by the habits of education and the prejudices of religion. Honour, as well as virtue, was the principle of the republic; the ambitious citizens laboured to deserve the solemn glories of a triumph; and the ardour of the Roman youth was kindled into active emulation as often as they beheld the domestic images of their ancestors. The temperate struggles of the patricians and plebeians had finally established the firm and equal balance of the constitution, which united the freedom of popular assemblies with the authority and wisdom of a senate and the executive powers of a regal magistrate.”

In a passage that would irritate Johnson, with his over-heated hatred of militarism and imperialism, Gibbon describes how Rome mobilised the power of its citizen army and its Italian allies, “who yielded to the valour and embraced the alliance of the Romans”. Rome was driven by “the spirit and success of a people incapable of fear and impatient of repose”, advancing “with rapid steps to the Euphrates, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ocean; and the images of gold, or silver, or brass, that might serve to represent the nations and their kings, were successively broken by the iron monarchy of Rome”.

However, from the heights of this imperial apogee the story of the ruin of Rome, according to Gibbon, “is simple and obvious”:

“The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed and finally dissolved by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of barbarians.”

Despite the radical fervour that they bring to their jeremiads, not even Johnson or Wolf could claim that this offers a relevant parallel to anything that is happening in the USA.


GIBBON ACTUALLY acknowledges a range of causes for Rome’s fall, including the role played by Christianity, and because this is often taken as a central element of his explanation for the fall of Rome it is worth careful review. Gibbon observes that when “the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that … Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire”. The enervating

“doctrines of patience and pusillanimity were preached [while] the active virtues of society were discouraged, [until] the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister [where] the sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age.”

Vast amounts of public and private wealth were “consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion [and] lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity”. Inevitably, “the church, and even the state, was distracted by religious factions [and] the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods”. Nevertheless, despite these corrosive affects, Christianity also provided “a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign.” Consequently, “if the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors”.

Christianity thus played a nuanced role. It gave expression to widespread feelings of guilt and unworthiness, of fatalism and despair with the present world, which conspired to produce a desire for salvation, with many escaping the vicissitudes of life in the here-and-now through new contemplative forms of religious life. The great martial ethic and absolute loyalty to Rome were swept aside by a new ethic of intense self-regard, elevated to supernatural heights. On the other hand, the new religion carefully rendered unto Caesar the civic observances that were required.

Having reviewed a range of causes for the fall of Rome, Gibbon turns from the Roman past to his own time, setting a precedent that Murphy, Johnson and many others have followed in suggesting that “this awful revolution may be usefully applied to the instruction of the present age”. For Gibbon, the civilisation of Europe (in which he includes America) enjoyed a high level of cultivation, prosperity, and happiness, and a system of arts, laws and manners that distinguished it from the rest of humanity. On the other hand:

“The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilised society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.”

In making this assessment Gibbon knew only too well how “cold, poverty, and a life of danger and fatigue fortify the strength and courage of barbarians”, while too many “polite and peaceful nations [neglect] the resources of military art”, and leave themselves unable to resist “the rude valour” of the barbarians. He laments that “the Romans were ignorant of the extent of their dangers and the number of their enemies” that were gathering: “poor, voracious, and turbulent; bold in arms, and impatient to ravish the fruits of industry”. These barbarian hordes were violently “agitated by the rapid impulse of war”, and behind them were the remorseless Huns, propelled westwards by their enemies, while beyond them all were “the distant revolutions of China”.

The French Revolution radicalised the historical study of Rome, with the French initially adopting doctrines and imagery that were inspired by the Roman republic, before shifting focus to the empire when Napoleon rose to power. Meanwhile, Britain and Germany turned to ancient Greece as a model of resistance to tyranny. Consequently, according to David Gress (From Plato to NATO, 1998), “ever since Napoleonic times, French thinkers … looked to Rome and accepted Rome’s contribution to the West, while progressive Germans, Britons, and Americans tended to see Rome as at best a necessary evil and to choose the Greeks as models”.

An interesting variation of this Northern view was proposed in 1800 by the German Romantic Johann Herder. He envisaged Rome as a near lifeless form that had lain on her deathbed for centuries until there came “northern giants, to whom the enervated Romans appeared dwarfs; they ravaged Rome, and infused new life into expiring Italy”. These are Northern European orientations towards Rome that have remained influential to this day, as we will see below.

The works of two later historians illustrate what was lost to Western civilisation with the eclipse of Rome. In his History of Rome (1854–56) Theodor Mommsen expressed the fundamental insight that it was the unparallelled stature and achievements of Rome that gave rise to the idea of the West considered as a civilisation distinct from, and opposed to, the East. Subsequently, in The Legacy of Rome (1920), Ernest Barker showed how the empire realised the Greek ideal of a universal society, a cosmopolis, in which all free men were equal under the law—thus providing the central political principle of Western civilisation. These observations emphasise the cataclysmic long-term cost of Rome’s destruction, the subsequent imposition of feudalism, and the unimpeded spread of Islam across lands that had for centuries lived under the rule of Roman law.


GIBBON’S VERSION of the fate of Rome was attacked at its very roots by Henri Pirenne, who began publishing his views in the 1920s. According to the “Pirenne Thesis” there was no fall, and neither the deposing of the last emperor in 476 nor the barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries involved the decline of Rome in any precipitant sense. The world of 600, he claimed, was no different in quality from that of 400, and many essential elements associated with civilised life under the Roman empire persisted for well over a century. The key event that signalled the transformation of Rome lay elsewhere:

“The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of Mediterranean unity. Countries like Africa and Spain, which had always been parts of the Western community, gravitated henceforth in the orbit of Baghdad. In these countries another religion made its appearance, and an entirely different culture. The Western Mediterranean, having become a Muslim lake, was no longer the thoroughfare of commerce and of thought which it had always been. The West was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources.”
(Mohammed and Charlemagne, 1939)

The new Islamic empire meant that “for the first time in history the axis of life [in this region of the world] was shifted northwards from the Mediterranean”, and European society regressed into feudalism. A period of anarchy did ensue in the transition period between 650 and 750 but eventually the traditions of antiquity quietly disappeared and the society of the Middle Ages emerged and dominated European history for the next 700 years.

An entirely new perspective on the end of Rome emerged after Pirenne. This postulates a previously unobserved era of “Late Antiquity”, and concerns itself with religious, artistic and cultural concerns. The first great articulation of this view was provided by Peter Brown in The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (1971), where he argued that “it is only too easy to write about the Late Antique world as if it were merely a melancholy tale of ‘Decline and Fall’ [when] we are increasingly aware of the astounding new beginnings associated with this period”, such as feudal society and the spread of Islam.

Brown shifted the historical focus to the study of contemplatives, monasteries, and holy men and women, and his relatively cheerful approach was a reaction not only to Gibbon but also to Eric Dodds, who had argued in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) that the later centuries of the empire were an “age of anxiety”, which arose out of the collapse of paganism and the spread of an all-pervasive fatalism, and found expression in the increasing popularity of salvation religions, exemplified by Christianity. Significantly, Dodds drew parallels between this ancient religious revolution and the apocalyptic and millennialist obsessions of the extremist political religions of the twentieth century.

According to the Late Antiquity school, the Roman empire never fell at all, but was gradually transformed into the forerunners of the European state system. This position has been put succinctly by its leading proponents in a major reference work, Late Antiquity (1999):

“The period between around 250 and 800 [was] a distinctive and quite decisive period of history that stands on its own. It is not, as it once was for Edward Gibbon, a subject of obsessive fascination only as the story of the unravelling of a once glorious and “higher” state of civilization. It was not a period of irrevocable Decline and Fall; nor was it merely a violent and hurried prelude to better things … Not only did Late Antiquity last for over half a millennium; much of what was created in that period still runs in our veins.”

Our patrimony, according to this view, was not drawn from the Romans but from a world of Late Antiquity dominated by the Germanic peoples of the North and the Muslims from the East. As Walter Goffart, another leading proponent of this approach, has observed with breathtaking insouciance: “what we call the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand”.

Inevitably, there has been a reaction to this perspective, and Gibbon’s key insights reappear in some very recent books on the fate of Rome, reflecting research that is far more informed by archaeology than previously. While they retain some of the insights of the Late Antiquity historians they also reassert the powerful notion of the fall of Rome that Gibbon unleashed into the intellectual tradition of the West. In his own comprehensive history of the period, the Oxford historian Peter Heather reviews the various theories and concludes that the western empire most definitely fell but “not because of the weight of its own ‘stupendous fabric’ [as Gibbon concluded], but because its Germanic neighbours had responded to its power in ways that the Romans could never have foreseen”.

The contemporary political dimensions of the historiography of ancient Rome are illuminated by another Oxford historian. Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2007) points out that the present prominence of the Late Antiquity model reflects dramatic shifts within European politics, particularly in connection with the rehabilitation of Germany in the post-Nazi era: “Already in the 1960s and 1970s the [ancient] Germanic peoples had been rehabilitated from murderous and destructive thugs to become an essential [civilising] element in the making of modern Europe.” Consequently, any diminution of northern Europe and elevation of Rome was resisted, and much was made, for example, of the fact that Mussolini invoked Rome for Fascist propaganda purposes, while a Rome-centred vision of Europe, it was alleged, “might give the Pope ideas above his station”.

Moreover, it was felt that a linking of Western civilisation with Christianity “would be disturbingly ‘American’” and offend the sensitivities of liberal and left-wing European secularists. It would also tend to elevate Rome, Athens and Istanbul over Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Brussels in future accounts of historic Europe—an especially vital consideration as the European Union continues its policy of expansion eastwards while also seeking always to accommodate and placate the demands of its expanding Muslim population and influential Muslim governments and organisations. These increasingly demand that European education and scholarship reflect the “Islamisation of knowledge” that replaces the traditional narrative of the West with one that reflects the teachings of the Qur’an, especially with respect to the respective accounts of religious history and contributions to civilisation.

Consequently, “an interpretation of history that keeps the Roman past, but transforms it into a post-Roman Europe dominated by the Franks, is therefore much more satisfactory”. Given these political considerations it was not surprising that the European Science Foundation’s research project into this period was entitled “The Transformation of the Roman World”: “In this new vision of the end of the ancient world, the Roman Empire is not ‘assassinated’ by Germanic invaders” as earlier French historians claimed, “rather, Romans and Germans together carry forward much that was Roman, into a new Romano-Germanic world”.

Ward-Perkins is not comfortable with this politicisation of the historical study of ancient Rome, and its misrepresentation of the scale of the calamity, concluding his own analysis as follows: “The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric time.” Retrieving some of the spirit of Gibbon, he concludes: “Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”


WHAT IS STRIKING about the conclusions first reached by Gibbon, and echoed in vital respects by Ward-Perkins and other recent historians, is how apposite they are at the present time. On one hand, the external forces that are being mobilised to attack Western civilisation are increasingly revealed to be barbaric, benighted, and regressive in the extreme. On the other hand, the critical internal forces upon which the West should be able to call for support exhibit only opportunism, complacency, resignation and antagonism (and indeed “self-hatred”) towards their own civilisation.

Unfortunately, Johnson and to a lesser extent Murphy must be counted as members of this latter adversarial group, an intelligentsia upon whom the massive scale of the challenge facing the West barely registers. Indeed, their books are essentially quite predictable critiques of American society from a left-liberal perspective superficially cast in the form of a discussion of the fall of Rome, informed by little relevant in-depth scholarship about that event, despite the fact that it is one of the most vibrant areas of contemporary scholarship.

For example, Johnson relies principally on only three secondary texts for his discussion on ancient Rome, which he embeds within a rather impressionistic and predictable discussion of contemporary American politics. Murphy seeks to give an appearance of depth to his own discussion and cites a 1980 survey that identified some 210 theories for the fall of Rome, ranging from too many warm baths (causing impotence) and lead piping (poisoning the population), to more academically respectable possibilities. However, he chooses not to evaluate any of these but simply reduces them to the lowest common denominator, claiming that “looking at the range of explanations provides a montage of Rome’s condition”, apparently believing that the various major theories about the fate of Rome can somehow be readily fitted together or overlaid without major inconsistencies or obscurities. In one paragraph alone he indiscriminately lists some eighteen possible reasons for the fall, including six in one sentence, concluding that “all the prime suspects shared in the deed”. It appears that Murphy is anxious to avoid getting involved in complex and perhaps insoluble historical discussions because what he really wants to do is propose his agenda for the reform of America, all neatly laid out by chapter according to a set of alleged parallels between present-day America and ancient Rome.

Nevertheless, there is a degree of inevitability about the association of Rome with America, with the implication that the known fate of one might inform us about the likely fate of the other. Indeed, so close are the two narratives entwined in American culture that this has become a political factor in itself, a situation that polemicists like Murphy and Johnson know and exploit with their pot-boilers.

This association arises partly from the coincidence that Gibbon began to publish his history in 1776, the year the United States Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress. The educated elite of the thirteen colonies had embraced an inspiring vision of Roman history, according to which a simple, hardy community had held fast to the virtues of family life, sober conduct and self-discipline, and had consequently built a great society. They enjoyed also a good knowledge of classical authors, and references to Plutarch, Livy, Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus and their works abounded in colonial literature, especially those works that contrasted a corrupt and oppressive present with a noble past characterised by virtue, simplicity, patriotism, integrity, justice and liberty.

For the Founding Fathers the parallel with their own times was compelling. Consequently, the fate of Rome was discussed frequently in the constitutional debates at Philadelphia, strengthening, for example, the case of those who argued for federalism instead of the centralised system that was taken to have fatally weakened Rome. The educated elite were also steeped in a notion of civic virtue derived from Rome and epitomised by George Washington’s “Rules of Civility”, while Washington himself was seen as a contemporary Cincinnatus—a citizen-soldier who led the republic to military victory before downing arms and returning to his simple life on the land, resisting the temptation to usurp the power of the republic.

This history had other vital lessons, and John Adams, for example, in his Defense of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America (1787) examined the governmental systems of twelve ancient democratic republics, three ancient aristocratic republics, and three ancient monarchical republics, finding them inferior to that adopted by the new American republic. Cato the Younger stood as a hero of republican liberty against those who would tyrannise the people, while Cicero suggested the pivotal principle that republics must be based on a system of checks and balances to prevent the abuse of power. Consequently, as Russell Kirk concludes in The Roots of American Order:

“the Roman concept of law and obligation, as variously expressed by Polybius and Livy and Virgil and Cicero and the Stoics, passed into American political thought and jurisprudence, and is permanently embedded in the American Constitution.”

Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy became one of the most popular plays in eighteenth-century America. Based on the last days of Cato the Younger, it deals with such themes as liberty versus tyranny, republicanism versus monarchism, and the duty of the individual to hold fast to his beliefs even under the threat of death. It was well known to the Founding Fathers, and was even performed for the Continental Army at Valley Forge. It gave rise to such iconic declarations as Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country”, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death”. After independence, Washington DC duly acquired its own Capital Hill named after Rome’s Capitoline Hill, while the Jefferson Memorial was a scaled-down version of the Pantheon, Union Station derived much from the Baths of Diocletian, the Washington Monument recalled Trajan’s Column and many other obelisks of ancient Rome, colonnaded federal buildings abounded, and even Goose Creek off the Potomac was renamed after the Tiber.

Conversely, Americans have also always had misgivings about Rome and what it might portend for their own young country as it continued its continental expansion. These fears found expression half a century later in one of the greatest and most popular works of American art, Thomas Cole’s five-part series of paintings, The Course of Empire (1834–36). This attracted huge crowds and gave brilliant visual expression to a popular enthusiasm for pastoral agrarianism as the ideal state of human civilisation, and the corresponding fear that the path of empire would lead inevitably to excessive centralisation, urbanism, corruption and decay. After depicting an Arcadian scene of pastoral tranquillity, Cole, in his third work, The Course of the Empire—The Consummation, depicts a future American imperial metropolis that is indistinguishable from a great Roman city. The next work however, The Course of Empire—Destruction, depicts its fate. In a scene inspired by the Vandals’ sack of Rome in 455, an enemy fleet and hordes of barbarian warriors lay waste to the city and all her people, raping, pillaging, and destroying every aspect of civilisation; even the sky is being consumed by a dark stormy vortex. Finally, in The Course of Empire—Desolation, we see the meagre fruits of imperial ambition, as the once grand buildings are swallowed up by the returning wilderness.

As Cole’s gigantic masterpieces demonstrate, concerns about the implications of empire recur throughout American history. Indeed, to Robert Hughes:

“the anxiety he expressed … is a very American one, and would raise its head at intervals right down to [the present]: the fear that this culture, so new, so full of shine and strength, could be swept away in one catastrophic eye-blink.”

And, crucially, the threat was not external military might but internal moral weakness, with the “seed of apocalypse … planted right in the heart of the American democratic experience”.


NOW, AS THE PRESENT POSITION of America as the world’s sole superpower sits atop the agenda of global politics, the perennial interest in the fate of Rome and its implications for America has once again intensified. Amongst contemporary commentators on the topic, Murphy identifies various positions that can be located between two opposed perspectives: the “triumphalists”, who believe that America is finally assuming its historic imperial role, imposing a Pax Americana on the world just as Rome brought its Pax Romana; and the “declinists”, for whom the USA is an arrogant and oppressive global force, an exponent and victim of “imperial overstretch”, “dangerously overcommitted abroad and rusted out at home, like Rome in its last two centuries”.

These perspectives can be found within America’s religious communities, taking a lead from the respective visions of the two great Christian saints of antiquity. The triumphalist “Ambrosians” see empire as a God-given vehicle for the propagation of the Christian faith, and here Murphy quotes from a Christmas card sent by Vice-President Dick Cheney and his wife in 2003: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” Alternatively, there are the declinist “August-inians”, who compare contemporary America to the decadence of Rome condemned by St Augustine in The City of God, which called upon Christians to disengage from the irredeemably corrupt secular world and await salvation in the hereafter as the shadow of the Vandals passed over the empire in its death throes.

Caught between the triumphalist and the declinist positions are historians like Niall Ferguson, who argues in Colossus (2004) that the reality of global politics requires superpower leadership, and that this role has presently fallen to America. However, Ferguson laments, at the level of national leadership America is an “empire in denial”, and that this reflects a deep-seated uncertainty and failure of nerve within the American ruling elite, concluding that “the threat to America’s empire does not come from … rival empires to the West or the East. I regret to say that it may come from the vacuum of power—the absence of a will to power—within.”

Murphy also invokes Paul Kennedy who, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), argued that America was facing a relative decline in its agricultural, industrial and financial sectors while also suffering from “imperial overstretch”, where America’s global interests and obligations become larger than the nation’s power to defend them. This requires an ever-increasing expenditure on the military, which squeezes out productive investment and leads to a downward spiral of slowing growth, heavier taxes, and a reduced capacity to bear the military costs. Kennedy observes that if this reflects a pattern in history, then one must concede that just as Rome and Babylon fell, so America’s turn will shortly come. Kennedy appears comfortable with this sombre (and facile) conclusion, remarking that futile calls for “renewal” are themselves a confirmation of the decline of America.

In Arrogant Capital (1994), the one-time leading conservative political analyst Kevin Phillips compared Washington DC to nineteenth-century London and fifth-century Rome, as yet another “bloated capital” presiding over an age of imperial decline and characterised by entrenched and arrogant elites, economic polarisation and a shrinking middle class, moral decay and a devotion to luxury, a loss of patriotism, and a general sense of a society in decline. This recalls The Culture of Narcissism (1979) by Christopher Lasch, and his denunciation of a self-centred culture of consumption that has undermined America, producing a bourgeois society that has lost both the will and the capacity to confront the threats that may overwhelm it.

Murphy calls this type of perspective on the fate of empires the “rot-from-within camp” and cites several other contemporary examples, including the radical jeremiad by Jane Jacobs in Dark Age Ahead (2004), which predicts that the failure of each sustaining cultural institution weakens others, so that with each collapse, still further ruin is ensured. Wolf’s book adds another apocalyptic view with her claims that America is turning into a fascist terrorist state.

A conservative analysis that focuses on internal decay is provided by Victor Davis Hanson in an article on Iraq in 2002. Hanson notes the widespread anti-Americanism of the country’s intellectual and cultural elites and observes:

“The anti-Americans often invoke Rome as a warning and as a model, both of our imperialism and of our foreordained collapse. But the threats to Rome’s predominance were more dreadful in 220 BCE than in 400 CE. The difference over six centuries, the dissimilarity that led to the end, was a result not of imperial overstretch on the outside but of something happening within that was not unlike what we ourselves are now witnessing. Earlier Romans knew what it was to be Roman, why it was at least better than the alternative, and why their culture had to be defended. Later in ignorance they forgot what they knew, in pride mocked who they were, and in consequence disappeared.”


WHILE COMMENTATORS like Hanson might be convinced that America is in decline because of the corruption of its intellectual culture, they nevertheless lament the impending eclipse. Not so the intelligentsia, which is the target of Hanson’s attack and is likely to be the biggest consumer of works like those by Murphy, Johnson and Wolf.

Located on the political Left, the intelligentsia positively embraces the decline and fall of America and Western civilisation as an act of deliverance, welcoming it as the well-deserved fate of intrinsically wicked and corrupt societies. In fact, this group is the principal vehicle for the relentless internal attacks on the “stupendous fabric” of liberal democratic civilisation as it has been constructed laboriously and at great human cost in America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere in the West over the past few centuries. For them, in the words of David Gress, the West is

“of all civilizations, uniquely rapacious, racist, sexist, exploitative, environmentally destructive, and hostile to all human dignity. It [is] unredeemable. Only if the West [goes] down to destruction [can] the rest of the human race hope to survive.”

The wilful absurdity of such claims is astounding. As a vast number of careful studies show clearly, on virtually any measure of democratic freedom, economic, scientific, military, technological, communications, infrastructure, educational, life-expectancy, and health care performance, America and other Western societies far outperform the rest of the world. Nevertheless, for much of the past century intellectuals have forcefully projected a view of Western society as “greedily materialistic, spiritually bankrupt, and devoid of humane values. Modern people are always [depicted as] displaced, rootless, psychologically scarred, and isolated” (Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History, 1997). Thus, for example, we find the radical Afro-American intellectual Cornel West applauding the “cultural decay [of] a declining empire”, with its “rootless, dangling people” and “powerless citizenry that includes not just the poor but all of us”, as America sinks further into inevitable and welcome decline.

A powerful adversarial intelligentsia seems to be an integral component of modernity in the West. Indeed, “never before the twentieth century had any civilization produced within itself as powerful, as varied, or as wide-ranging a tradition of radical self-criticism as that of the West” (David Gress). This intellectual elite enjoys a privileged status by virtue of its superior education and control over the critical apparatus of culture, a control that gives it leverage over the political system that its ideas would not otherwise achieve, especially if they were exposed to the normal democratic process. As Stephen Koch explains in Double Lives (1996), his study of the Soviet manipulation of Western intellectuals, this adversarial intelligentsia is drawn irresistibly towards radicalism because, it believes, radicalism alone can “tear aside the bourgeois façade [to reach] the deepest truth”, which is a vision of the fundamental wickedness and corruption of America society and Western civilisation. In terms of its cultural nihilism and hatred of everything respected or revered in the Western tradition it recalls the iconoclasts of eighth-century Byzantium and the image breakers of the Reformation.

Consequently, for this group of radical declinists “bad news is actually good news”, and all reports of “economic depression, unemployment, world wars and conflicts, and environmental disasters [are received] with barely concealed glee, since these events all foreshadow the final destruction of modern civilization” (Arthur Herman). Crucially for the ever-increasing influence of this dread-filled perspective of history,

“most people today are barely aware of [the influence of this] almost sadistically redemptive component of the pessimist tradition. Instead, the sowing of despair and self-doubt has become so pervasive that we accept it as a normal intellectual stance.”

Ultimately, it is the radical intelligentsia and the crisis of the cultural sphere that hold the key to the great historical questions about the fate of Rome, America and the West. Consequently, it is the failure of writers like Murphy and Johnson to draw creatively upon the history of Rome to systematically address the existence and role of this vital elite that constitutes their greatest weakness. And this is all the more surprising given that: (1) They are happy to do so in so many other areas; (2) The scholarship exists, because many historical analyses of the fate of Rome focus on the ideological, cultural and religious dimensions of the catastrophe. Any such analyses will be particularly useful where they focus on the origins and nature of civilisational fatigue and failure, such as that which saw the eclipse of Roman civic virtue and its traditional religions, and the emergence and ultimate victory of Christianity in the form we know.

This scholarly concern began with Gibbon but is present in many major historical works, even when they downplay the notion of a precipitant fall, including Pirenne and the Late Antiquity school. Perhaps the reason the intelligentsia does not engage with these issues is that it is afraid to confront within itself the same forces of nihilism that fatally undermined Roman civilisation and opened the way to a millennium of violence, oppression and stagnation.

Ultimately then, does the fate of ancient Rome have any lessons to teach us? Indeed it does, but these are not the facile offerings of Murphy, Johnson and other left-wing polemicists. Nor are they the lessons contained in the jeremiads of those who wish to embrace the desirability or inevitability of decline; such people know not what they wish for. Reviewing the work of the historians described above, it seems undeniable that civilisations and empires are indeed the awe-inspiring achievements that Gibbon and the others recognised. Consequently, they demand a massive and sustained investment of material resources and human faith and energy. They may well be subject to some principle of decay, and decline may indeed be the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness, with the causes of destruction multiplying as diverse peoples and regions are brought within their compass. At times crises may abound.

Nevertheless, in confronting such challenges, we enjoy today the great advantage over the ancient Romans that we have before us their timeless example—the stupendous fabric of their achievement—and also know clearly the terrors and desolation that civilisational collapse entails. For five centuries since the Renaissance revealed the achievements of the ancients, the West drew inspiration and insights from their example and these have guided our civilisation through the greatest period of sustained change in human history. The great dangers faced now by the West are not transitory political issues that find a place in polemics, but a failure of nerve at the deepest level, a loss of respect for the past, and a collapse of our commitment to building the future.

Dr Mervyn F. Bendle is Senior Lecturer in History and Communications at James Cook University. He contributed “Indicting Liberal Democracy for Genocide” in the March issue.

The Four Goals of Life, aka the Purusathas

We will all die. Therefore, the purpose of life is to cease all this struggle, to go outside under the blue or cloudy or dark sky, and vanishing into the light itself or sun or star, vanish into enjoyment of the pleasure of the senses and the sense of mind. Death is infinite: enjoy today as if it is your last day.

We will be dead forever. Therefore, practice morality as if each act were judgement for forever. Rehearse each day for forever. If there is no afterlife, then at least you lived a decent live for the insignificant time you existed. Time is infinite: act wisely today as if it is you last act.

Space is infinitely abundant. Therefore, seek to own and possess as much space as possible with all your effort, knowing that gain, profit, spending and getting are a constant joy and teacher of wise frugality for as long as you live. Space is infinite: get rich today as if it is your last provision for the future.

The field of consciousness is unfathomably profound. Therefore, seek to know the source of consciousness and thereby become liberated from bondage to death, time, space and individuality. Consciousness is infinite; seek liberation in consciousness only.

========

There are 4 classical Indian life-goals, called the purusarthas:

Moksha (liberation)
Dharma (morality)
Kama (desire)
Artha (wealth)

========

Seeking desire, die exhausted.

Seeking living space, die rich and powerful.

Seeking decency, die satisfied.

Seeking to be enlightened, Go Beyond ego, existence and life, to the All, illuminated by the Light of the Self.

Acting Out On Negative Urges

"Acting out" is jargon for bad behavior. The phrase "acting out" implies that it is OK to have negative thoughts and urges, just so long as one does not act out on them destructively. The phrase "acting out" is commonplace in personal development circles, where such urges are welcomed as stimuli for character growth.

Today I came across a fascinating concept that makes the idea of acting out more practical. Here it is:

We don't have to act on negative urges the moment we become not willing to pay the price for acting on such feelings.

In other words, the solution to negative urges is to expand awareness of the cost of acting on them until one no longer wishes to act. Freedom comes from asking "What are the costs of my acting out?"

The root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between acting out of negativity and exercising restraint in service to growth, is that negative urges produces backwardness because they do such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, and to worship.

The ultimate cost of acting out on negative urges is that it undermines the dignity and integrity of whole person. Such a cost is never worthwhile.

Tell yourself:

This defect of character will fall. It cannot withstand the exercise of faith, truth, and freedom.

[Masturbation, Tantra and Self-love, by Margo Woods]

This article is obscure but I think important and deserving a wider audience

[Bruce's comment: It is okay to be sexual. Sexual energy is not only beautiful and valuable, but it's also a way to experience God, or Tao. This book provides an extremely effective to experience this - to make love to oneself, without shame. It is the key to healthy society and healthy relationships between men and women. It is an alchemy that is needed to open the heart and creates the love: not only the self love, but the love of any kinds.

If you do not have the open heart nor the willingness to experiment; or if you are irritated by the idea of masturbation, please simply skip this page and go back to the previous level. But I promise you that if you dare to experiment following this book, the return will be miracle.]



"Some Statistics according to Kinsey's research in his book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (Alfred Kinsey, 1948), a true eye opener:- 35% of all American males had sexual relationships with other males at some point in their live; 65% of all females masturbate - and more frequently, as they get older; 94% of all males had masturbated at some time in their lives, and that the other 6% was obviously Baptist ministers who lied to save their necks; Even at age fifty, over half of the males are all masturbating during the course of a single week; Some respondents whacked off twenty-three times a week in early adolescence; and even at age fifty, a few hardy souls were putting in two dozen shots a month. "

"You cannot truly experience love without having experienced self love."

"We all have our favorite masturbation stories, and favorite almost-got-caught stories. The wonderful thing about masturbation stories is that they give us full range to our fantasy for. "

"I cannot spot the difference between the act of intercourse and the act of masturbation, except for the delicious presence of another person."

"If this is nothing else to be learned from this book, it is that self love - without shame, with good humor, with a willingness to experiment - is the key to a healthy society and healthy relationships between men and women."

"Love for the self can be translated into a means of achieving energy release, spiritual growth, and a method of plumbing new artistry in thinking, feeling, writing, and growing. It's an alchemy that is needed to open the heart and creates the love: self love or any other kind."

"First, working with the sexual energy in this way helps the inner child to grow up and to have more strength to break the parent-induced patterns. It also gives him/her a sense of confidence, centering, and personal identity which are necessary to become a whole person. Secondly, my experience with opening the sexual energy in myself and others is that it is not a handicap in relating to other people, but rather an asset. I have become more loving and more powerful and more attractive. I have not been rejected on account of my heightened sexuality, nor am I crazed or horny all the time."

"If you delay your orgasm and raise the energy up in your body, you will eventually reach a level of energy at which orgasm does not bring you down. And in the meantime you will benefit from the effects of that energy flowing through your body whether you have orgasms at the end of your sessions or not."

"The Sexual Revolution has begun. Everyone, or almost everyone, know it's OK to be sexual. Human beings are sexual and passionate by nature, and it is not difficult to remove the negative conditioning and allow the natural human being to replace the conditioned one."

"Sexual energy is not only beautiful and valuable, but a way to experience God.

"To make love to myself, to masturbate, and to stop at the point just before orgasm, put my attention in my heart, and let the energy go up to my heart. The exact point to stop is the point where I know that one more stroke will make me come. "Just take your hand away, and let the energy go up to the heart." After each rush of energy to the heart I was to resume masturbating, repeating the cycle, until there seemed to be no more energy, or I felt like stopping. There was no prohibition against orgasm, only the requirement to delay it, letting the energy go to the heart first. Delaying my orgasms in this manner, I found, made them more intense."

"Exercise every day and makes it a part of my life. The simple exercise has proven to be a method of internal alchemy, a method by which I have begun to make changes in my psycho-physical system and thus changes in my states of consciousness."

The heart-opening experience: What I mean by that is, the experience of being in love but without another person to be love with, "Pure Love." In other words, I was in love with everyone and everything, felt totally at peace and physically beautiful. I was loving and clear and loved. I became Love Itself. My heart was clearly opening bit by bit. I became more loving, and more able to express love to others, more patient, more open, and less afraid of other people or their disapproval. I began to see my heart as a psychic organ as well as a physical one. I could put my attention in my heart when talking to a friend or client and know, in some inexplicable way, what they needed from me and how to give it to them."

"I became more magnetic and more satisfied with the ease and pleasure of my sexual experiences. It seems that the most important ingredient of sexuality if that personal magnetism, that magnetic attraction. With it, sex is easy. Without it, sex becomes a hassle and a chore. The masturbation exercise, without a doubt, increases one's personal magnetism. I also began to see that my vitality, my aliveness, and my enthusiasm were increasing noticably. Friends remarked how wonderful I looked, how alive I was. I began to learn that I could direct the energy to any part of my body, not only my heart, and began using it for healing, directing it to any place in my body that wasn't feeling right."

"Work with the heart center first. For one thing, you will probably not be able to generate enough energy to make it all the way to the head at first, but the most important thing is that the heart is a great safety valve. If the heart is open, even a little, there is no tendency to heart oneself or others. Love wishes everyone well."

"The problem that I see with many people who are taking this spiritual path is that they try to work on the upper centers before they work with the body and the heart. Work on your heart first. When you start to feel yourself loving the people in the supermarket and crying at parades you will probably be ready to work on the other centers. One of the most interesting aspects of this process has been that I have developed an unshakeable sense of identity and Oness about ourselves. This is the self love which is talked about so much in books and workshops these days. Have you ever asked, "How?" when the workshop leader said that it is important to love yourself?"

"The way of using the sexual energy produces self love more intensely than any other exercise I have ever tried. **One learns to love oneself by making love to oneself. I want to give you enough in this book that you can duplicate all of the experiences of myself and my students and learn for yourself how simple and easy and joyful sex can be. Love your body. Realize that what you don't like is not only conditioned by a Play-boy/Playgirl image of what is beautiful, but is one of the many ways you keep your body frozen and incapable of transmitting sexual energy. In so far as you don't like your body, you freeze your sexual energy. Realize also that you can change your body if you want to. Take a long baths, relaxing, and washing yourself tenderly with your bare hands. Give extra attention to the parts of your body you don't like, massaging them gently and lovingly."

"As for the masturbation exercise, the only thing to remember is that it is extremely simple - raising the body's sexual energy almost to the point of orgasm, and instead of letting the energy go out into the orgasm, allow it to come up in the body, up to the heart. It happens that, at the point just before orgasm, there is a channel open in the body, nad if you rest at that point and put your attention in your heart, the energy which has been generated will flow naturally upwards toward the heart. You don't have to do anything; it just happens. Don't worry about what it feels like, or if it is happening, just do it! Begin and adventure with yourself to see what your sexual energy is all about. Rediscover the physical system you were trained to ignore. "

"If you have difficulty talking yourself into a masturbation session, or in making love to yourself regularly, remember that you are conditioned away from that activity. Take the position that masturbation is now your meditation."

"Start your session by touching and loving yourself with your hands or soft fabrics all over your body before you go for your genitals and other erotic zones. You may have an orgasm at the end of a session if you like, or you may find that you come by accident, and that will probably end your session for you. Men particularly will need to stop each round far short of orgasm till they learn what the point of no return is for them."

"The idea that a man must have orgasm or risk physical pain is erroneous. It certainly does not happens to men who are moving the energy upwards. The biggest problem you will have with this exercise is not how to do it, because it is extremely simple, but your own training against masturbation."

"The pleasure you experience will do more to work against your negative conditioning about your body and your sexuality than anything else you can do or think."

"I suggest you have a session with yourself every day, as a meditation, for three months, and see what the results are for yourself."

"It is necessary to include a word about sexual fantasies. I can't imagine making love to myself without fantasies. They seem to create the experience for me. I suspect that much of the problem and lack of enjoyment people have with masturbation, in addition to their belief that is wrong, is that they do not use their fantasies. All of us have a potentially rich fantasy life. So go on with your fantasies. They won't hurt you - not even the weird ones."

Froglessness, a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh

Froglessness



The first fruition of the practice

is the attainment of froglessness.



When a frog is put

on the center of the plate,

she will jump out of the plate

after just a few seconds.



If you put the frog back again

on the center of the plate,

she will again jump out.



You have so many plans.

There is something you want to become.

Therefore you always want to make a leap,

a leap forward.



It is difficult

to keep the frog still

on the center of the plate.



You and I

both have Buddha Nature in us.

This is encouraging,

but you and I

Both have Frog Nature in us.



That is why

the first attainment

of the practice –

froglessness is its name.



Thich Nhat Hanh.

Rudolf Steiner, thought gnosis, will gnosis, and feeling gnosis.

Rudolf Steiner's six exercises effect thought (1), will (2), and feeling (3), then infuse positive thought into feeling towards equanimity (4), positive thought into will towards full open-mindedness (5), and unify will and thought with feeling in a positive evolutionary way (6).

I am reading Roy Wilkinson's superb introduction to anthroposophy online, and it stimulating excitement and a sense of energy in me to read about how the inner life of the soul functions.

However, I find the six exercises a little hard to apply easily. So here are my notes on the first two exercises, informed by my existing understanding of gnostic meditation:

Thought gnosis.

Build a mental picture of an entire field of accurate facts, holding them all in mind, then one by one eliminate the facts while retaining the entire picture. When the picture is eliminated completely let go completely into voidness of thought, and rest for a while until thought upsurges again.

It it best to read a short chapter or paragraph of a much loved spiritual teacher and create a mind map of their words to begin. Just assemble all the understandings they give, with no interpolations of your own ideas. Then eliminate one idea after another until only the energy field of the ideas remains.

I suggest starting with a paragraph of the Upanishads, a chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, or the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of the biblical book of Matthew.

Will gnosis.

Build up a field of interconnected intentions, values, and associated emotionalised ideas, such as a goals list, a prcoess plan, or a mind map of your intended actions. Feel the sense of motivation, then as you release each portion of the intentions, feel the sense of motivation lessen and diminish until you have let go of all willing and experience voidness of intention. Observe this void and notice if and when will re-arises of itself.


Feelings gnosis.

Take a non-verbal piece of music which seems full of feeling to you. Listen to it several times until it is by memory. Replay it mentally in full. Then replay it backwards. Then simply eliminate a piece of the music and note the feeling quality of the music that remains. Then eliminate piece by piece the entire composition until one is left with silent feeling alone.

Results.

You can expect these exercises to great augment thought, will and feelings over time. Patience and persistence is key.

Macrocosm and Microcosm

There are two paths, the path of ecstacy and the path of the mystic. The ecstatic might be said to be lunar and thus learn lessons (saturn) in a haphazard nonlinear manner. The mystic may be said to be solar, that is, fixed in dedication, and thus the saturnian impacts are pure and clear.

The solar mystic feels more keenly the true nature of suffering as his own karma. The lunar ecstatic experiences rapture as release from the ego, and a loss of distinct self as well as distinction between true and false, fact and fancy.

The ecstatic in ecstacy penetrates his astral body tightly and feels himself to become a lunar mirror, illuminated with reflections of pure and indistinct consciousness. Like a sleeping person he forgets his ego in the feeling body of the astral. Like a sleeping person - since in sleep a man forgets both ego and astral body - he is disadvantaged in that he cannot distinguish true from false whilst in the state of rapture.

The microcosm is the objective real world of sustances and worldly meanings as experienced by the etheric body and the physical body. It can be languaged as earth, air, fire, water, and spirit, but as Plato points out in the Timaeus, these are just processes of one single substance in constant flow. In this sense it is the archetypal lunar sense of actuality, of felt experience as quality in and of itself.

The macrocosm is the objective energetic kosmos of integral structure, pattern, and flow: ego and astral body engage it. The ecstatic penetrates and grips the astral and the ego is made rarified; the mystic penetrates the etheric and the ego is made dense. Thus one might see the spheres of Geburah and Chesed exemplified. Or one might see Ken Wilber's clarifying pictures as the solar imperative, making sense of the universe.

To summarize: in expanding into the Macrocosm, the ecstatic's Ego becomes evanescent or rarified, whereas in shrinking into the Microcosm, the mystic's Ego becomes concentrated or densified through impacts with reality.

The hermetic four cherubim are the sins of omission. The eagle is omissions of thought, the lion omissions of feeling, and the bull omissions of will. Finally at the boundary of the microcosm itself stands the human, omissions of spirit, who is the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.

One might visualise the pentagram with the accretions of past actions, errors of omission and comission, which slow down the flow of energy through the corners and back out into the macrocosm. The angles of the pentagram symbolise the sensory-nervous-hormonal reality of the bodymind, which can only generally focus on about five inputs at once. At one focuses attention on an input to the bodymind, it holds back the free flow of invisible spiritual energy and creates or forms an organ.

The senses hold back the flows which created them, forming the eye from light. The body holds back the flow which created it, creating matter from energy. The microcosm is the holding pattern of the macrocosm which created it, creating the individualised consciousness of the microcosm, the ego-I.

But it operates in reverse too. What the eye holds back from light effects in turn the source of light. Thus what I as microcosm hold back from freely flowing is what the macrocosmic spirits also hold back. The spiritual realm responds directly to our restraint from natural action. This concurs with the Kaballistic teaching, and also wtih the 12 step teaching of steps 6 and 7 of "doing what you don't want to do, and not doing what you do want to do."

Here is the process: through discernment, one notes a tendency to lie, or to steal, or to hate a certain kind of person. So when the tendency arises, instead of acting out of the tendency, one surrenders the urge and the satisfaction associated with the urge to the spiritual urge, the macrocosmic field. You turn it over to God. Thus the lower nature of the microcosm is denied free action, and the higher nature of the macrocosm is stimulated to act on our behalf. Through perseverance in practice the microcosm becomes transformed to more accurately carry the light of the macrocosm. All this arises through the simple process of surrendering self-centered actions, thoughts and feelings to a higher power.

The Six Exercises for Basic Esoteric Development of Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner gave six exercises which are fundamental to his meditative work.

No. 1 - The Control of Thought

The first exercise has to do with the control of thinking. It is designed to keep our minds from wandering, to focus them, in order to strengthen our meditative work. There are several versions of this exercise. Here is one version:

Select a simple object - a pin, a button, a pencil. Try to think about it exclusively for five minutes. You may think about the way the object is manufactured, how it is used, what its history is. Try to be logical and realistic in your thinking. This exercise is best if practiced faithfully every day. You may use the same object every day or a new object each day, as you choose.

No. 2 - The Control of Will

Choose a simple action to perform each day at a time you select. It should be something you do not ordinarily do; it can even be a little odd. Then make it a duty to perform this action at that time each day. Rudolf Steiner gives the example of watering a flower each day at a certain time. As you progress, additional tasks can be added at other times.

This exercise is as hard as it is simple and takes a very strong intention to complete. To start you might think of it as you think of a dentist's appointment - you do not want to be late. It can be helpful to mark your success or failure on the calendar each day. If you completely forget at the time, but remember later, do it then and try to do better the next day.

No. 3 - Equanimity

The third exercise is the development of balance between joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the heights of pleasure and the depths of despair. Strive for a balanced mood. An attempt should be made not to become immoderately angry or annoyed, not to become anxious or fearful, not to become disconcerted, nor to be overcome by joy or sorrow. Rather should your natural feelings be permitted to be quietly felt. Try to maintain your composure. This leads to an inner tranquillity and purer feelings of the soul.

No. 4

This exercise is the development of a positive attitude to life. Attempt to seek for the good, praiseworthy, and beautiful in all beings, all experiences and all things. Soon you will begin to notice the hidden good and beautiful that lies concealed in all things. This is connected with learning not to criticize everything. You can ask how something came to be or to act the way it is. One way to overcome the tendency to criticize is to learn to 'characterize' instead.

No. 5

For this exercise, make the effort to confront every new experience with complete open-mindedness. The habit of saying, "I never heard that" or "I never saw that before" should be overcome. The possibility of something completely new coming into the world must be left open, even if it contradicts allyour previous knowledge and experience.

No. 6

If you have been trying the earlier exercises of thinking, will, equilibrium, positivity and tolerance, you are now ready to try them together two or three at a time, in varying combinations until they become natural and harmonious.

For more information see Guidance in Esoteric Training, by Rudolf Steiner:

http://steinerbooks.org/research/archive/outline_of_esoteric_science/outline_of_esoteric_science.pdf

Or click on the title of the this blog entry to go to the full list of basic Steiner books.

TheCenter and circumference of a sphere in Steiner.

"In order to understand the center point of a sphere, you must understand the circumference."

This sentence adapted from Rudolf Steiner evokes the whole symbol of pisces excellently, and also reminds me of da Vinci's strategy of seeking the boundaries and limits of a field in order to understand its essence. I am also reminded of the description in Timaeus of the body of the cosmos as sphere - what remains in the center of the Platonic cosmos but that which is beyond it, the Creator itself! This saying applies just as excellently to the ten kaballistic spheres or sephirot.

The primacy of subjective experience in the process of coming to understand cannot be overestimated. Perhaps, even, such a subjective experience of the unity of center and circumference in a given sphere of activity is the sole aspect of wisdom that can last forever.

The Top Ten Ways To Remember Just How Much You Love Your Self

"You may only be one person to the world, but you may also be the world to one person." – anonymous.

In order to love someone else, you first have to love yourself. This is an important truth, but what does loving yourself really mean? Well, the word “love” is a verb. If you plan and take actions to show your love to others, actively planning and doing things to love yourself works to create more love in yourself

Here are the top ten choices you can feel more self-love. (They also work on other people too!)

1. Make a List of Things you Like About Yourself

Sometimes we focus so much on what we’d like to change about ourselves that we actually forget there’s a lot to like as well. So take a few minutes and remind yourself of the positives you can be proud of. Think of physical attributes, mental or emotional strengths, successes you’ve experienced, the way you support your friends, or anything else. Make your list as long as possible, and then keep adding to it.

2. Ask Others to add to your List

Go to the people you trust—a friend, a romantic partner, a therapist, a family member—and ask them what they’d list as your most positive characteristics. You may be surprised to find out that people see a lot more of your strengths than you realize.

3. Treat yourself like a Best Friend

You know how you treat someone you really care about? The way you love and support that person and treat him or her with kindness and respect? Do that for yourself. And just as you’d challenge a close friend who’s making bad decisions with his or her life, challenge yourself as well. Just as you would for a good friend, remind yourself over and over again of your immense worth as an individual and that you deserve great things in your life. Challenge yourself to achieve the best life possible.

4. Pay Attention to your Needs and Desires

This may sound a bit silly, but some people really don’t know what they want and need. They can go through their entire adult lives living only for others without stopping to ask the question “What do I want here?” or “What’s best for me?” One of the best ways to love yourself is simply to pay attention to what it is that you want and need—in your job, in your relationships, in your friendships, and in your whole life.

5. Protect Yourself

When you love yourself, you’re much less willing to let someone take advantage of you or to have toxic people in your life. Refuse to be the kind of person who so desperately wants to be loved that they’ll put up with anything in a relationship. You’re worth more than that. Protect yourself from people who don’t have your best interest at heart, and choose not to allow yourself to be treated in unloving, disrespectful ways.

6. Listen to your Self-Talk

Repeatedly calling yourself an idiot or a loser is one of the least loving things you can do for yourself. So today, right now, commit to making your self-talk positive. Maybe take the list of things you like about yourself and repeat some of those attributes as you move through the day. When you do make a mistake, be generous with yourself, and instead of telling yourself how stupid you were to lose your keys, just say, “Oh, well. It happens. Everyone loses things from time to time.” As you talk to yourself, don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone else you love.

7. Take care of your Body

You don’t have to become a marathoner or a supermodel. But do your best to be healthy. Few of us eat exactly as we should or exercise as much as we ought to, so there’s no reason to beat yourself up over not being perfect. But taking small steps to take care of yourself physically is one of the best ways to show yourself love. By treating our bodies well, we send ourselves the message that we deserve good things.

8. Take Care of your Inner Life

Don’t neglect your spirit. Slow down from time to time and pay attention to what’s going on within yourself, where you’ll find all kinds of reserves to draw on when you need strength and support. Taking the time to pray, meditate, connect with others, and read meaningful books can nourish our love for ourselves and enrich our lives in many ways.

9. Show yourself Compassion

Be willing to forgive yourself, and be patient as you grow. All of us make mistakes, and we all have certain shortcomings that make it easy for us to get down on ourselves. But remind yourself that you’re only human. There’s no reason to expect perfection. When you make a mistake or notice something about yourself that you don’t like, don’t judge or harshly criticize yourself. Instead, be compassionate and remind yourself that you’re doing your best.

10. Live in the Now

This isn’t always easy to do, but one powerful way to love yourself is to focus your energy and attention on the present moment. Don’t dwell on the past, with all the painful regrets that might exist there. And let go of the future, with all its crippling concerns and anxieties. Then invest yourself in appreciating all the good in your life right now; pour yourself into the present moment and make the most of who you are right now.

Keep in mind that loving yourself isn’t selfish. Think of the heart, which pumps blood to itself first before sending blood out to the rest of the body. Similarly, the more loving you are to yourself, the more love you’ll be able to send out to the other people in your life—your family, your friends, and the people you date.

When you get right down to it, love’s not a feeling, it’s a decision. So make a choice right now to love yourself and to work on loving yourself more fully day after day.

On My Reading of Plato's Protagoras and Timaeus

I read Plato's Protagoras this week.

It was confusing.

I think it was intended to be confusing. Protagoras and Socrates talk around the essential issue of virtue without ever hitting on the essence because of their cultural biases.

Look at these guys' huge blind spots:

Both men seem to believe in cause and effect - that every act must have a singular cause. Both men seem to strictly use defintions, as if the definition were the experience itself. Both men fail to refer to direct experience, or to even value it that highly - thought it must be said that Socrates seems the more pragmatic of the pair. Protagoras is a good talker, but is he full of hot air or not? The lack of praxis makes it impossible to assess him. Naturally we are supposed to take Plato's side that the sophists are tossers, but I find myself quite unsympathetic to the lot of them.

Granted the way the conversation is conducted is the height of good manners, and the way Socrates traps Protagoras is highly amusing. I think the message that we may not be able to know what virtue is objectively is fine: humbling and realistic philosophy. And perhaps it is a fine representation of Socrates view itself, rather than Plato's.

All the practicing Neoplatonists I have contacted are theurgists or fringe academics. Both, surprisingly, refer to the Timaeus as their starting point.

So yesterday, good Friday, I purchased the Timaeus at Imprints bookseller and started the read, so different from the outset from the Protagoras, it might as well be a different author. The cover of the Penguin edition is magnificent, incidentally, and it is fantastic value for 13 dollars.

I am only half way through the Timaeus, but it is a very magnificent and beautiful piece of writing.

Planetary Sigil Contemplations

These simple contemplations are designed to help those wishing to explore the symbolism and magick of the Seven Classical Planets to come to a greater understanding of the sigils or glyphs associated with each in turn. They are suitable for complete beginners or those wishing to further expand their symbolic knowledge of the well known and powerful glyphs associated with each in turn. These contemplations were included in the book "Practical Planetary Magick" by Sorita d'Este & David Rankine as an appendix and those unfamiliar with the symbols for the seven classical planets are advised to first collect a set for use alongside these contemplations to avoid confusion.

Sun
Close your eyes and visualise the Sun symbol in gold on a purple background. As you visualise the golden circle with its central golden dot, contemplate the solar qualities of egotism, friendship, joy, success, wealth and will. How strong are each of these forces in your life?
Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?

Mercury
Close your eyes and visualise the Mercury symbol in orange on a blue background. As you visualise the orange circle on top of the orange equal-armed cross, surmounted by the orange crescent with its horns up, contemplate the Mercurial qualities of communication, deception, flexibility, magick, memory and speed.
How strong are each of these forces in your life? Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?

Venus
Close your eyes and visualise the Venus symbol in green on a red background. As you visualise the emerald green circle on top of the emerald green equal-armed cross, contemplate the Venusian qualities of beauty, culture, fertility, love, sexuality and sociability.
How strong are each of these forces in your life? Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?

Moon
Close your eyes and visualise the Moon symbol in silver on a yellow background. As you visualise the silver crescent facing to the left, contemplate the Lunar qualities of clairvoyance, dreams, glamour, spirituality, transformation, and your unconscious.
How strong are each of these forces in your life? Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?

Mars
Close your eyes and visualise the Mars symbol in red on a green background. As you visualise the scarlet red circle with the scarlet red arrow coming out of the upper right (NE) of the circle, contemplate the Martial qualities of anger, courage, passion, strength, vengeance and vigour.
How strong are each of these forces in your life? Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?

Jupiter
Close your eyes and visualise the Jupiter symbol in blue on an orange background. As you visualise the sapphire blue equal-armed cross with the sapphire blue crescent facing left joined to the leftmost tip of the horizontal bar of the cross, contemplate the Jupiterian qualities of authority, ethics, fortune, humour, responsibility and truth.
How strong are each of these forces in your life? Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?


Saturn
Close your eyes and visualise the Saturn symbol in black on a white background. As you visualise the black equal-armed cross with the black left-facing crescent attached to the bottom of the cross, contemplate the Saturnian qualities of austerity, duty, equilibrium, limitation, vpatience and self-discipline.
How strong are each of these forces in your life? Which of them are you actively trying to cultivate or transform? What other qualities or events do they bring to mind as you contemplate their influences?

The Book of the Sun, by Marsilio Ficino

THE BOOK OF THE SUN (DE SOLE)

~MARSILIO FICINO~

Introduction

The Book of the Sun represents the culmination of Ficino's life and work. Published in 1494, five years before his death, it is a supreme example of the very synthesis of astrology, religion and philosophy for which Ficino strived all his life, and illustrates his ability to convey the deepest mystical experience within a lucid, authoritative prose. In the Dedication to Piero de' Medici Ficino tells us that the origin of this work is the metaphor of the Sun in Plato's Republic, and that he was inspired by Pseudo Dionysius on the same subject 1 Ficino's new reading of the Republic passage was destined for the third edition of his Plato translation, patronised by Piero.

In an "Apology" to Philippo Valori, Ficino begs Valori, now Florentine Ambassador to the Pope, to defend him against future accusations of heresy stemming from his two little 'solar' works (De Sole and De Lumine), for which he had already prepared himself; he precedes the De Sole with a preface to the reader in which he explains how his book should be interpreted in an allegorical and anagogical sense rather than dogmatically (a sentiment echoed in a letter to Poliziano, dated 20th August 1494). In fact De Sole is not lacking in material to invoke the anger of the theologians, and one of their possible accusations is anticipated by Ficino himself in a letter to Bernardo Rucella2 - some of his words on the creation - writes Ficino - could in fact be 'misunderstood' and interpreted as contradicting the text of Genesis (see Ch.X).

In this book3 about the Sun and its light there are certain passages which are also found in the other works of Marsilio.4 But since the author himself wrote this compendium out of a wish to present it and make it accessible to those who have not been able to obtain the large volume, we have wished to alter nothing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Marsilio Ficino: De Sole Preface, to Piero de' Medici

I am daily pursuing a new interpretation of Plato already begun long ago under your auspices, Oh magnanimous Piero, and (as is not unknown to you) I expound it with rather frequent distinctions of terms and quite long arguments to the extent that the subject itself requires it. Therefore when lately I came to that Platonic mystery where he most exquisitely compares the Sun to God Himself, it seemed right to explain so great a matter somewhat more fully, especially since our Dionysius the Areopagite, the first of the Platonists, whose interpretation I hold in my hands, freely embraces a similar comparison of the Sun to God. Therefore while working for many nights, illumined by this Sun as if it were my lamp, I have thought to cull this choice subject from my great work, and to entrust it to its own compendium, and to send this mystery of the Sun - like the gift of Phoebus - to you. To you also, both as the finest student of Phoebus, the leader of the Muses, and as patron of the Muses, this new complete interpretation of Plato is dedicated, so that meanwhile by this light as if some kind of Moon (just like the Sun to the Moon), you may augur of what nature this whole Platonic opus will be; and if ever you have loved my Plato, or rather yours as he has been for a long time now, henceforth kindled by this light may you love him more ardently, and with your whole mind embrace the beloved.

Chapter I: Marsilio Ficino to the Reader,

that this book is allegorical and anagogical rather than dogmatic

Oh magnanimous Piero, it is a truly divine Pythagorean precept that mysteries and things divine are not fit to be spoken about without light. By which words I think that wise man not only means that nothing should be ventured in things divine unless in so far as the light of God itself has revealed it to inspired minds, but also he appears to advise us not to proceed toward the occult light of divine things, whether to receive or reveal them, without the mediation of the manifest light. Therefore for the present we will advance from the manifest to the occult, not so much by rational arguments, but through certain correspondences drawn from the light, according to our abilities. But meanwhile, most careful reader, be indulgent to me -just be mindful of the Apollonian and as it were poetic licence before the Sun, while not disallowing me a more serious and (as the Greeks say) dogmatic content. I have promised an allegorical and, to that extent, a mystical exercise of the wits, in the name of Phoebus the oath-orderer, whose gifts these are. The Muses never argue with Apollo, they sing. And indeed even Mercury himself, the first artisan of argument, although he may discuss weighty matters with Saturn or Jupiter, yet with Apollo he plays, their jests not only fitting but divine. May our play also not be unfitting! But now, having completed this our prelude on light, let us move forth into the light with the fortunate inspiration of goodness itself, that is God on high.

Chapter II: How the Light of the Sun is Similar to Goodness Itself, Namely, God.

Nothing recalls the nature of goodness more than light. Firstly, light appears very pure and very exalted in the realm of the senses. Secondly, of all things it is most easily and widely radiated in an instant. Thirdly, it harmlessly encounters everything and penetrates it very gently and pleasantly. Fourthly, it carries with itself a nourishing warmth, that cherishes all things, bestowing life and movement. Fifthly, while it is present and within everything, it is spoiled by nothing and mixed with nothing. Likewise goodness itself stands above the whole order of things, is spread very widely, and caresses and attracts everything. It forces nothing; like heat, it emanates love as its companion everywhere, by which every single thing is enticed from every direction and willingly admits of its goodness. Penetrating into the innermost parts of things, it mixes with none of them. Finally, just as goodness itself is inestimable and ineffable, so assuredly is light. For not one of the Philosophers until now has explained the following: that nothing anywhere is clearer than light; but that on the other hand nothing appears more obscure, just as goodness is both the most recognised of all things, and equally the least recognised. For this reason Iamblichus the Platonist finally came to refer to light as a certain active vitality and clear image of divine intelligence. The ray shining forth from the eye is itself the image of vision. So too perhaps is light itself the vision of the heavenly soul, or the action of vision reaching out to exterior things - acting from a distance, yet not leaving the heavens, but ever continuing there unmixed with external things, acting at once by seeing and by touching. At least we are used to speaking of light as a trace of universal light, offering itself to our eyes in a certain proportion; or indeed, as a vital spirit between the soul of the world and the body - but we have already said enough about this in the Theologia. 5 So whenever in your studies you make a serious attempt to postulate that there are many angelic minds beyond heaven, like lights, whose ordering relates them both to each other and to one God, the father of all lights, what will be the point in pursuing your investigations down long winding paths? Just look up at heaven, I pray, Oh citizen of the heavenly realm, at that heaven whose manifestly perfect order so clearly declares God to be its creator. When you look upwards at heavenly things, the firmament immediately announces the glory of God and the works of his hands through the very rays of the stars, and through the aspects or inclinations of their eyes as they wander. Above all the Sun is most able to signify to you God himself. The Sun offers you signs, and who would dare to call the Sun false? Finally, the invisible things of God, that is to say, the angelic spirits, can be most powerfully seen by the intellect through the stars, and indeed even eternal things - the virtue and divinity of God - can be seen through the Sun.

Chapter III: The Sun, the Light-Giver,

Lord and Moderator of Heavenly Things

The Sun, in that it is clearly lord of the sky, rules and moderates all truly celestial things (I shall omit for the present its enormous size which is thought to be 160 times the earth). Firstly, it infuses light into all the stars, whether they have a tiny light of their own (as some people suspect), or no light at all (as very many think). Next, through the twelve signs of the zodiac, it is called living, as Abraham and Haly 6 say, and that sign which the Sun invigorates actually appears to be alive. Moreover, the Sun fills the two adjacent signs with so much potency, that this space on both sides is called by the Arabs the ductoria of the Sun - that is the solar field. When planets pass through them, avoiding being burnt up in the meantime, they acquire a marvellous power, especially if the superior planets, finding themselves in this position, rise before the Sun and the inferior ones after the Sun. The sign in which the Sun is exalted, that is Aries, in this way becomes the head of the signs, signifying the head in any living thing. Also, that sign in which the Sun is domiciled, that is Leo, is the heart of the signs, and so rules the heart in any living thing. For when the Sun enters Leo, it extinguishes in many regions the epidemic of the Python's poison. Moreover the yearly fortune of the whole world will always depend on the entry of the Sun into Aries, and hence from this the nature of any spring may properly be judged; just as the quality of summer is judged from the ingress of the Sun into Cancer, or that of autumn from its entrance into Libra, and from the coming into Capricorn the quality of winter is discovered; these things are gleaned from the figure of the heavens present at that time. 7 Since time depends on motion, the Sun distinguishes the four seasons of the year through the four cardinal signs. Similarly when the Sun returns by the exact degree and minute to its place in the nativity of any person, his share of fortune is unfolded through the whole year. It happens in this way because the movement of the Sun as the first and chief of the planets is very simple (as Aristotle says), neither falling away from the middle of the Zodiac as the others do, nor retrograding.

Chapter IV: The Conditions of the Planets with Respect to the Sun

There appear to be certain definite spaces marked out throughout the heavens by the Sun itself; when the planets pass through them they quite change their motion and character. For when Saturn, Jupiter and Mars traverse a part of the heaven a third part from the Sun, finding themselves to be in a trine aspect in respect to Sun, they suddenly change direction, and move either forwards or backwards. If they are oriental to the Sun they go retrograde, if occidental they turn direct. 8 Venus and Mercury travel through certain shorter but still fixed spaces with respect to the Sun; Venus is prevented from separating beyond 49o and Mercury beyond 28o. The Moon changes her appearance and nature in whatever aspect she makes to the Sun. And as if she were another Sun, she herself has four ages, and represents the four seasons of the year. And whenever the Moon is joined to the Sun, from that very heavenly configuration and degree of conjunction she announces the nature of the month to come. Whenever any planet first touches the heart of the Sun, 9 at that time (however short it might be), it dominates the other planets. Otherwise, when close to the Sun they vacate their accustomed office - so that Saturn conjunct the Sun is judged to abandon his pristine rigidity and Mars his accustomed ferocity. In so far as the Sun approaches the superior planets they rise [in their epicycle], and as he separates from them, they descend. Indeed, when conjunct the Sun these planets are at the height of their epicycle, while when they are in opposition to it they are at their lowest, and when in square, at middle altitude. The Moon is at its highest point in the first two places of its cycle, while in the square aspect it is descending. Venus and Mercury, when conjunct the Sun, if direct, are at their highest; if retrograde, 10 at their lowest. Nor is it possible for the planets to complete the circuit of their epicycle without revisiting, by conjunction, the Sun as if their Lord; it seems quite clear that the superior planets, when they change their course into a trine aspect with the Sun, revere its regal appearance. And therefore conjunct the Sun they are highest and direct, because during that time they are concordant with the king. Now on the other hand, when discordant - that is, in opposition - they are retrograde and at their lowest point. When Venus and Mercury touch the Sun, if then they are direct, that is, obeying their Lord, they ascend to their heights. But if they turn aside they are like rebels, and they are cast down during that time. It ought not to surprise us if the Moon too rises [in its epicycle] when in opposition to the Sun. For what is the light of the Moon if not that selfsame light of the Sun sent to her and reflected in the lunar mirror? And at full Moon the light is turned back into the Sun, now in full view. The Moon appears to descend in a square aspect since then she gazes fiercely at her lord. As the Sun does not move backwards, so neither does the Moon, although due to her velocity her epicycle appears to regress. Lastly, when the Moon in the Sun's path seeks the north, a place constituted from the huge head of the dragon, 11 she signifies - by virtue of solar power - an increase for the signs situated there. When she seeks the south, marked by the projection of the tail, she brings a decrease. All the planets made oriental or occidental from the Sun change their condition and appellation in either of the two places. They all revere the path of the Sun which the astrologers call the ecliptic. The inferior planets more so and the feminine planets (that is, the Moon and Venus) most of all, therefore they diverge the most by latitude. Indeed all of the planets placed on that path - moving from there to the north or the south, are thought to change their condition. The Moon, the lady of generation, has no manifest light except from the Sun. When she is in perfect harmony with the Sun, she takes from it all the celestial powers which are gathered there, as Proclus says, so that she may convey similar powers down to our earth.

Chapter V: The Power of the Sun in Generating,

and in the Seasons, at the Time of Birth and in All Things.

In the birth chart of each person the very position of the Moon itself declares the Lord of the nativity and the moment of conception. And the conjunction or opposition of the Sun and Moon prior to the birth reveals the truth and fortune of the nativity. In any given chart that portion of the sky where the part of fortune falls is called the daemon of the nativity by the ancients, and it portends or governs (as the Egyptians say) the tenor of the whole life. The part of fortune is designated by the space observed between the Sun and Moon, projected from the degree of the Ascendant. Thus it is through their knowledge of the Sun's motion that astronomers discover and measure the movements of the planets. The Sun in its motion distinguishes days from nights and hours and months and years. Likewise by its light and warmth, it generates, quickens, moves, regenerates, fills with breath and cherishes all things which had been hidden; at its first advent it reveals them, and signals the coming and going of the four seasons of the year; and regions which are too remote from the Sun are likewise remote from life. Indeed Spring is the best of seasons since it begins with Aries, the kingdom of the Sun. Autumn is the worst, because it begins with Libra, the fall of the Sun. Finally a diurnal nativity is thought better than a nocturnal one, the former being judged mainly from the Sun, the latter from the Moon, which is like the Sun's mirror.

The celestial figure at the nativity is divided into twelve parts. Astrologers appoint the ninth part to the Sun, and the third to the Moon (calling the former God, and the latter Goddess), and they believe that wisdom, faith, religion and eternal glory are the greatest gifts of each. For the Sun signifies all these things, and simply all essential truth and prophecy and kingship. It follows from this, that as the Sun ascends to the midheaven it fosters the vital and animal spirits in us in a miraculous way, and as it descends, each spirit is debilitated. This is why David, the trumpet of Almighty God, rising to his lyre at daybreak broke forth into song and exclamation. It is vain for us to get up before dawn, for it is clear that the rising Sun brings us every benefit and revives our spirits, which wonderfully aroused and illumined, are called to sublime things. I shall pass over how (as tradition has it) the Sun, like a prophet, at its rising is thought to bring prophecies to those who sleep. The Moon, which Aristotle calls the lesser Sun, similarly restores the spirit and natural humour when rising, and weakens it when setting. And the more the Moon is full of the Sun's light, the more health she brings to all things. I shall also omit how the Moon, when she is not waning, should be observed in its aspect to the Sun, in each of the signs, signifying the various parts of the body; and so the virtues of all heavenly things are brought down to the limbs from the Sun via the Moon, to be nurtured through medicines ritually prepared at that particular time. But we have already said enough about this in the Book of Life. 12

Chapter VI: The Praises of the Ancients for the Sun,

and How the Celestial Powers are all Found in the Sun, and Derive from the Sun

For these reasons Orpheus called Apollo the vivifying eye of heaven, 13 and what I am about to say is taken straight from the Hymns of Orpheus: "The Sun is the eternal eye seeing all things, the pre-eminent celestial light, moderating heavenly and worldly things, leading or drawing the harmonious course of the world, the Lord of the world, immortal Jupiter, the eye of the world circling round everywhere, possessing the original imprint in whose image all worldly forms are made. The Moon is pregnant with the stars, the Moon is queen of the stars." These things Orpheus says. In Egypt, on the temples of Minerva, this golden inscription could be read: "I am all those things which are, which will be and which have been. No one has ever turned back my veil. The fruit I have borne is the Sun". Whence it appears that this Sun born of Minerva - that is, of divine intelligence - is both flower and fruit.

The ancient theologians, with Proclus as witness once again, stated that Justice, the queen of all things, proceeds from the middle of the Sun's throne through everything, directing everything, as if the Sun itself could be the moderator of all things. Iamblichus states the opinion of the Egyptians in the following way: Whatever good we have we get from the Sun, that is, either from itself alone, or from another agency as well, in other words either directly from the Sun, or from the Sun through other things. Likewise the Sun is the lord of all elemental virtues. The Moon by virtue of the Sun is the lady of generation. Therefore Albumasar said through the Sun and Moon life is infused into all things. 14 Moses thinks the Sun is lord of celestial things in the day and the Moon, like a nocturnal Sun, at night. They all place the Sun as lord in the midst of the world, although for different reasons. The Chaldaeans put the Sun in the middle of the planets, the Egyptians between two five-fold worlds: the five planets above, the Moon and the four elements below. Indeed they think it is placed by Providence closer to the earth than to the firmament, so that the gross material of the earth and the moisture of the Moon, air and water might be cherished by its fervent spirit and fire. Also, by another theory, the middle place is declared by that prosperity of the planets which requires their disposition to the Sun to be such that Saturn, Jupiter and Mars rise before it and Venus, Mercury and the Moon after it, thereby maintaining the King on the middle path. The others, in proceeding differently, turn out to be weaker. Moreover amongst them those planets are held to be more pre-eminent, which the lord Sun itself ordered to precede it. But let us return to the ancients. The old physicians called the Sun the heart of heaven. Heraclitus called it the fountain of celestial light. Most Platonists located the world soul in the Sun, which, filling the whole sphere of the Sun, poured out through that fiery-like globe just as it poured out spirit-like rays through the heart, and from there through everything, to which it distributed life, feeling and motion universally. For these reasons, perhaps, most astrologers think that just as God alone gave us an intellectual soul so he alone sends it to us under the influence of the Sun; that is, only in the fourth month after conception. But this is something that concerns them. On the other hand there is no doubt that Mercury, which signifies the movement of our mind, moves the least far from the Sun. Saturn, signifying the state of the separated mind, departs least from the ecliptic. Moreover Jupiter and Mars the former through Sagittarius and the latter through Aries - are concordant with the Apollonian Lion, and have obtained their respective gifts: Jupiter signifying religious justice, civil laws and prosperity, and Mars magnanimity, fortitude and victory. The Moon, Venus and Mercury are called the companions of the Sun; the Moon because of its frequent conjunction with the Sun, Venus and Mercury because they do not stray beyond the vicinity of the Sun, on account of their advancing in step with it. Hence they have received the rulership of universal generation. Accordingly the Moon, rather humid in conjunction or aspect with the Sun, having absorbed its vital heat, may thereby provide a warming and vital humour to those things to be generated. Moreover in this process of generation Mercury mixes these two parts with the rest in a certain harmonious proportion. Venus applies seemly forms to mixtures of this kind, and adds grace and joy. Thus the Sun has distributed the whole of the light collected in itself through various stars differing amongst themselves in kind, and thus sets in order virtues in every form, with light that can take any form. From which one may clearly conjecture that there are just as many virtues of the Sun as there are stars existing in the heavens.

Chapter VII: Dispositions of the Signs and Planets Around the Sun and Moon

The very disposition of the signs of the zodiac clearly declares that the Sun is the king, and the Moon which is both sister and wife of the Sun, is queen of heavenly things. For Leo, the place of the Sun, and Cancer, the place of the Moon, are next to each other; likewise are Aries the exaltation of the Sun and Taurus that of the Moon. 15 The other planets each take their seats on both sides around the King and Queen, who are placed in the middle. On one side next to Leo Mercury rules Virgo, on the other side next to Cancer it rules Gemini. Venus, on the one side Libra, on the other Taurus; Mars, Scorpio and Aries; Jupiter, Sagittarius and Pisces; Saturn, Capricorn and Aquarius. But once when I laid out the signs of the planets around the Sun and Moon like this, my friend Bindanio Recasolano, a man of profound judgement, objected thus: "Don't you see, Marsilio, that those same signs, although in a reverse order, have been laid out in the same pattern around the signs of Saturn?" I said, "I see that this arrangement, especially suiting the Sun, relates however to most lofty Saturn too. Is it surprising that Saturn is worthy of honour, since he appears least of all the planets to deviate from the regal path of the Sun?". But let us return to the purpose in hand.

These five planets each have two seats [rulerships]. One following the Sun as if from behind, the other in proximity to the Moon. The former are called occidental to the Sun, the latter oriental to the Moon. The Sun and Moon claim for themselves the whole Zodiac. For the province of the Sun comprises Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn; the province of the Moon, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Perhaps Cancer is called the gateway of men, since there the Sun seems on the point of descending; and Capricorn the gateway of the gods, since there the Sun seems to ascend resolutely. 16 But we have explained these things elsewhere in a different way. Actually these two signs, together with Aries and Libra, claimed for themselves the signity of being called cardinal points of heaven, since there the Sun decrees the changes of the four seasons. Since the Sun, when passing through Aries and Libra, holds its middle course between ascent or descent and balances day with night, the circle produced from Aries to Libra is called amongst the Egyptians the Circle of Minerva, that is, of wisdom and justice. Indeed so wonderful an order of heavenly things declares that the world is not determined by fortune, but by providence. And a certain reverence of all things for the one Sun, the moderator of the whole, shows that angelic minds and all heavenly things entirely obey the one high up above the heavens, and that our souls ought to be much more obedient to the same.

Chapter VIII:

Planets are Fortunate when Concordant with the Sun and Moon,

Unfortunate when Discordant. How they may pay Respect to the Sun and Moon

Ptolemy considers the Sun and Moon to be the authors of life, in that the Moon supplies that which concerns growth and quickening, and the Sun, that which relates to consciousness. He also considers Jupiter and Venus to be salutary to life, because through a certain harmonious proportion they are consonant with the Sun and Moon. Jupiter is most harmonious of all with the Sun, and to some extent also with the Moon, and Venus the reverse. However Saturn and Mars are the opposite, since they disagree with the Sun and Moon Saturn more with the Sun, Mars more with the Moon. Jupiter is more supportive to life than all the others, since, in blending the lights of the Sun and Moon he unites the powers of both. Nor is it to be overlooked, that the planets obtain new vigour suddenly when they look upon the face of the Sun or Moon as if in greeting, which the Arabs called almugea. This happens when, following the Sun, they are as far from it as their sign is from the Sun's sign, or when, preceding the Moon, they approach it by as much as their sign is close to the Moon's sign. Thus Saturn will greet the Sun as often as it is occidental, that is, risen after the Sun, in the sixth sign from the sign of the Sun. Jupiter will give greetings when in the fifth sign from the Sun, Mars when in the fourth, Venus in the third, Mercury in the second. Similarly they will greet the Moon when, rising before her, they are found at the same distances from her. Again we find agreement between Jupiter and Venus and the Sun and Moon, disagreement from Mars and Saturn. In fact Jupiter has placed his seat in Sagittarius in a trine aspect to the sign of Leo, the seat of the Sun, whilst Venus located Libra through a beneficial sextile aspect to Leo. However, Mars placed his seat in Scorpio in a square, dissonant aspect to the Sun, and Saturn placed his in the sixth sign from the Sun, not consonant with it, and in the seventh, totally opposed to it. For he confronts both Leo with Aquarius and Cancer with Capricorn. In a similar fashion Venus establishes Taurus in sextile to Cancer, Jupiter places Pisces in trine, Mars sets Aries in square, Saturn, as we have said, is located in both the sixth and seventh signs from the Moon's. Therefore Jupiter and Venus are called the fortunes, in as much as they are concordant with the King and Queen of the heavens. Saturn and Mars are the infortunes, since they are discordant with them; but Saturn is the more unfortunate, since he seems to disagree most strongly with the Sun, even more so than Mars does with the Moon. Hence we can deduce that those minds which are in agreement with divine will will be happy, whilst those discordant with it will be miserable.

Chapter IX: The Sun is the Image of God. Comparison of the Sun to God

Having very diligently considered these things, our divine Plato named the Sun the visible son of Goodness itself. He also thought that the Sun was the manifest symbol of God, placed by God himself in this worldly temple so that everyone everywhere could admire it above all else. Plato and Plotinus said that the ancients venerated this Sun as God. The ancient gentile theologians placed all their gods in the Sun, to which Iamblichus, Julian and Macrobius testify. Certainly whoever does not view the Sun in the world as the image and minister of God, has certainly never reflected upon the night, nor looked upon the rising Sun; nor has he thought how extraordinary this is, nor how suddenly those things which were thought to be dead return to life. Nor has he recognised the gifts of the Sun through which it alone accomplishes that which the surrounding stars cannot. Therefore also consider, together with the Platonists and Dionysius, that Phoebus, the chief intelligence of the Muses, is the visible image of God. Also that Phoebe, that is, the Moon, is the image of Phoebus almost in the same way that he is of God. And as Hipparchus says, she is the mirror of the Sun in that light falling on her from the Sun deflects onto us. It is not appropriate to discuss it at present, but we must not overlook that Platonic comparison which I have described more fully elsewhere.

In the same manner as the Sun generates both eyes and colours, giving the eyes the power by which they may see, and colours the potency by which they are seen, and joining both of them together with a uniting light, so God is thought to be with respect to all meanings and intelligible things. God in fact created the intelligible species of things and intellects, giving them an appropriate natural power. Moreover the Sun daily pours out a universal light through which it excites to mutual action the virtues of both the intelligible and intellectual realms, and joins them together through action. Plato calls this light truth with respect to intelligible things, and knowledge with respect to the mind of man. He thinks moreover that the good itself, that is God, surpasses all these things, just as the Sun is superior to light, eyes and colours. But when Plato says that the Sun prevails over the whole visible realm, doubtless he alludes to an incorporeal Sun above the corporeal one - that is, the divine intellect. Seeing that it really is possible to ascend to the archetypal pattern partly by the taking away of that which is worse and partly by the adding of what is better, take from the Sun - from whom Averroes took gross physical matter - all definite quantity. But leave it with the potency of light, so that there will remain the light itself, cleansed by miraculous power, defined neither by a definite quantity nor by any definite shape, filling with its presence a space immense with respect to the imagination. This pure light exceeds the intelligence just as in itself sunlight surpasses the acuity of the eyes. In this way, in proportion to the strength you receive from the Sun, you will almost seem to have found God, who placed his tabernacle in the Sun. And finally just as nothing is more alien to the divine light than utterly formless matter, so nothing is more different from the light of the Sun than the earth. Therefore since bodies in which the earthly condition prevails are most unsuited to light, they accept no light within. This is not because the light may be powerless to penetrate - for while this light cannot illuminate inside wool or a leaf, it may however penetrate a crystal in a moment, which cannot be easily penetrated by anything else. In this way the divine light also shines in the darkness of the soul but the darkness comprehends it not. Is this not also similar to God, who first sows knowledge of divine things in angelic and blessed minds, and then love? Indeed God kindles a love for us believers here which purifies and converts, before it bestows the intelligence of divine things. Thus the Sun completely fills with light clear and pure natures everywhere, as if they are now, for a moment, heavenly; while those opaque and material natures it first warms and kindles with its light, then refines, and soon illuminates. And sometimes it elevates to the heights through heat and light this matter now made light and accessible. Hence Apollo pierces the dense body of the Python with the stings of his rays, purges it, dissolves it and raises it up. Nor must we forget that in whatever manner we hope that Christ will finally come into his kingdom, resurrecting human bodies from the earth with the splendour of his own body, similarly after the yearly dead winter, we look forward to the Sun's reign in Aries, which will recall to life seeds of things on earth, as if suddenly reviving dead or half-alive animals to life and beauty. Hence Mercurius, as the arms bearer of the Sun, is said to excite those who sleep with his caduceus, and Plato describes an almost similar resurrection in his book on the Kingdom. 17

Chapter X: The Sun was Created First, and Placed in the Midheaven

On this subject we might ask, what most powerful thing did God create in the beginning? Moses answered, light. Rightly so, for light emanates immediately from the divine - or rather intelligible - light itself, which of all things is most similar to God. Indeed the intelligible light is in the incorporeal world above us, that is, extremely pure intellect. However, the sensible light is in the corporeal world, that is, the solar light itself. But light in its first stage, as on the first day, was established simply to shine within and illuminate without. At the second stage it strengthened itself by its own power of heat, then it quickened everything else. At the third stage, it propagated itself in matter by its own efficacy and by the command of God. Lastly at the fourth stage of its nature and order, as if on the fourth day, it was allotted its spherical form, whence the light of divine intelligence having been diffused, it was reflected back onto itself. Therefore Moses declared that on the first day simply light itself was created; whereas on the fourth day light for the solar, that is, spherical form, was provided. Also Plato twice refers to the dual constitution of the Sun in the Timaeus, first placing it amongst the planets as their companion, secondly presenting it as divine, with a light miraculous beyond all things and with a regal authority. The majority of astronomers place the Sun, at the beginning of the world, on the horizon in Aries which is its kingdom, in the midst of the heaven which it would have occupied like a citadel and capital in the guise of a king. Also where Moses says that one day was completed, he did not mean morning then evening, but the other way around, indicating that after midday, in which the Sun was lit up, the newly-born day declined towards evening and must complete itself with the following morning. He certainly confirmed the regal authority of the Sun, when he assigned the first day, that is the solar, to the Lord. For if God indeed completed the world in six days, and rested on the seventh, undoubtedly he seems to have begun the world from the very day of the Sun, or rather under the auspices of the Sun's authority. Whereas he judged Saturn to be very remote from the Sun, unfavourable in generation and action, when he commanded a cessation of activity on the day of Saturn. Surely too Christ, the source of life, for whom the Sun mourned with covered face at midday, rose again from the dead at the hour and in the day of the Sun, and will restore to us intelligible light in the same way as the Sun gives us visible light?

Chapter XI: The Two Lights of the Sun. The Gift of Apollo.

The Degrees of the Lights. The Sun Renders all Things Divine

If we think of the Sun in its pristine nature, which it was allotted at the first moment of its creation, just as it were numbered in common fellowship with the planets, we will recognise that its first natural light was not as great as it was soon to become. For it does not exceed the other stars in magnitude as much as in light. In fact it is less than twice the size of Jupiter, but perhaps a hundred times greater in light. Of course these quantities are evaluated by comparison to the earth - indeed we said at the beginning how many times the Sun could contain the earth, and Jupiter is thought to be 95 times greater than the earth. Therefore this other immense light is entirely poured forth from another place, added from above to the natural light of the Sun. Clearly all heavenly things have brought with them their own light at their birth, but it escapes our notice, being either infinitesimal, or hidden from us through a certain fineness and brilliance, or for another reason. The Sun from the beginning appears to have brought with itself a certain similar light slightly greater in proportion to its magnitude. Indeed the Sun offers that innate light which is somewhat obscure, then immediately another light most evident to the eyes like a visible image of divine intelligence and infinite goodness.

God, as our theologians relate, gave a double light to our minds. The first they consider to be natural. The second was added freely from above according to merit through grace, and it renders minds blessed with a miraculous bountifulness. Therefore since the stars are images of minds, it is fitting that these stars likewise carry two lights. In whatever way God has wonderfully added this immense light to the first light of the Sun, so the Sun, at once the representative of God in this office, adds this second light to the innate light of the stars. Indeed, just as we are accustomed to call the light which appears in the Moon not the Moon's own, but the Sun's, transmitted all the way down to us through the Moon, so with respect to the most secret doctrine of the Platonists we shall say that such a great splendour revealed in the Sun proceeds not from itself, but from God through the Sun to all things; just as light reaches our eyes not from the Sun's globe, but from God himself. God, while he filled the solar globe, a tiny particle of heaven, with such great splendour that brilliance flowed out into all things from it, without doubt made it clear both that the small body of the Sun received such an incomparable gift not from itself, but from above, and that out of the one God, the whole goodness of the Sun was propagated throughout everything. Indeed in the same way that this sensible light is experienced by the senses, illuminating, invigorating and forming all sensible things and faculties of sense and converting them to higher planes, so a certain intelligible light in the soul of the Sun illuminates, kindles and recalls the inner spiritual eye. I think for this reason the Sun was called Apollo by the ancient Theologians, and creator of all harmony, and leader of the Muses, since he releases minds from a certain confused turmoil, not so much by visible but by hidden influxes of rays, and he tempers them proportionately, and finally leads them to understanding. Nor should it be thought that this most full and efficacious light, given to and extended among worldly things as the most perfect gift, takes its origin from the small body of the Sun, but from the good itself as the father of lights, in whom whatever is of light is certainly beyond intelligence and quite surpassing all understanding. From there descending into the divine or angelic intellect it becomes intelligible, and then reaching the mind of the world soul it becomes intellectual and imaginal, and then passing into heaven it becomes both sensual and sensible, finally being sent down to the lower regions (as if now divided) it becomes sensory in the eyes of living creatures and in sensible objects, and keeps both characteristics in a few creatures which can see in the dark. But let us return to where we were.

According to the Platonists there are three principles: the good itself, the divine intellect and the world soul. Only light clearly contains all of them in itself. It reveals the good itself, since while it surpasses wonderfully all things, it also spreads itself through all things, and recalls them to sublime planes at the same time with its miraculously preserved excellence and purity. It reveals the divine intellect because it declares, distinguishes and adorns everything, and the world soul, because it generates, warms and moves everything with a vital heat. And in the same way that it descends into heaven from the three supra-celestial principles and then manifests them under the heavens, the Sun in the middle heaven represents the good itself, and the divine intellect, or rather the plenitude of ideas manifest through the firmament full of stars, and finally the world soul through the mutable light of the Moon. Similarly below the heavens the first principle is represented through fire, the second through air and the third through water. Finally as the superior stars are illuminated by the Sun steadily, and the Moon receives the Sun's light mutably, so the angels receive it unchangingly, and souls are illuminated in a changeable way.

Chapter XII:

Similitude of the Sun to the Divine Trinity and the Nine Orders of Angels,

Likewise of the Nine Spirits in the Sun and of the Nine Muses around the Sun

There is nothing in the world more like the divine trinity than the Sun. For in the one substance of the Sun a certain three-foldness exists, distinct in its parts yet united. Firstly a natural fecundity which is completely hidden from our senses, secondly, a manifest light flowing out of this fecundity, ever equal to it, and thirdly a heating virtue quite equal to both. The fecundity represents the Father; light, likened to intelligence, represents the Son conceived of intelligence; heat stands for the loving spirit. Around this divine trinity our theologians discovered three hierarchies of angels, each one containing three orders. The first consecrated to the Father, the second to the Son, the third to the Spirit. Also around the solar trinity we find similar three-fold and nine-fold orders, since out of that very fertile nature of the Sun, three natural fecundities are generated through everything. The first of them is found in celestial nature, the second in the simple nature of the elements and the third in the nature of mixed things. Furthermore, beyond these natures both life and that three-fold order are propagated far and wide from the vital heat of the Sun. The first is vegetable as in plant-forms, the second is responsive but immobile as in zoophytes (plantlike animals), the third is responsive and purposively mobile as in more perfect living things, that is, animals.

Next, from the light of the Sun, three kinds of brightness are derived, both in and below the heavens: the light is either completely white, or completely red, or mixed. Indeed since light is found to be very similar to the dawning of perception, especially that of the senses, it is appropriate that to the three kinds of light there seem to correspond also three types of sense. To the red, the wholly corporeal senses of taste and touch; to the white the most incorporeal senses of imagination and sight; but to the mixed light correspond the senses in the middle between the incorporeal and corporeal, of hearing and smell. In this, the light of the Sun is not only the image of things of this kind, but also their cause. Indeed it is the sole image of pure intelligence, for just as pure intelligence pierces through instantly and penetrates deeply, and reveals things, mixing with nothing in its sublime existence, so light itself radiates through all things in a moment, and discloses particular things, whilst still remaining indivisible and whole, mixed with nothing else. Accordingly as the Sun sets, no light lingers in the air, not even for a moment, but everywhere accompanies departing Phoebus. But since - I know not how - I am here under Apollo as if a poet (even if not a good one), let me tell a little story. Firstly then concerning the higher gods (to speak Platonically), and the nine Muses, the ancients placed these divinities in the Sun. We may contemplate the substance or the powers of the Sun in its substance, essence, life, intelligence. In the manner of the ancients, we identify essence in the heavens, life in Rhea, intelligence in Saturn. If we contemplate the powers of the Sun after its substance, we will call its fecundity Jove and Juno, its light Apollo and Minerva, and its heat Venus and Bacchus. Indeed the ancients always represented Phoebus and Bacchus - who reign more gloriously in the Sun than the others - as youths, and if anyone were to experience the light and heat of the Sun with the sincerity and appropriateness by which they exist there, to take it up for their own use and to accommodate its properties, he would achieve eternal youth, or at least would live to be one hundred and twenty.

After these nine divinities inside the Sun let us move on to the nine Muses around the Sun. Now why nine Muses around the Sun, unless they mean nine types of Apollonian godhead distributed through the nine spheres of the cosmos? At first the ancients only recognised eight heavens. Later, under the celestial fire, they added pure air as the ninth heaven, which was heavenly with respect to its quality and motion. Indeed in each sphere they distributed divine spirits hidden from the eyes, each dedicated to a particular star, which Proclus called angels and Iamblichus archangels and principalities. But whichever ones amongst them are especially solar, the more ancient people called them Muses presiding over all knowledge, especially poetry, music, medicine, atonements, oracles and prophecies. Now let us return to the Sun. We inept ones admire too much certain very insignificant things, if only because they are very rare; but blind and ungrateful, we have long since stopped admiring the very great things we used to respect. No one wonders at fire, burning just like the Sun of heaven, pure without being mixed, perpetually in motion, most splendid, which makes a very great show out of nothing, reducing everything to itself. No one wonders at the Sun to the extent that it is right to do so, ruling as it does over everything incomparably, the father and moderator of all things, healing sadness, vivifying things not yet alive and reviving things now dead. Indeed if once every year the home of omnipotent Olympus were to be thrown open, so great a splendour would suddenly be contemplated that everyone would most likely admire the Sun more than they do; they would humbly adore the Sun as the highest God, or at least they would hardly doubt its divine provenance. They would thank God daily as much as possible, as the hidden author of so great a gift. Therefore the Platonists Iamblichus and Julian commanded us to imagine the night without any light from the Moon or stars (by which the gift of the Sun is also manifest) so that we might realise more clearly what we would be without the supernal Sun, and how much we should owe to it.

Chapter XIII: That the Sun is not to be worshipped as the Author of all Things

When he was in military service Socrates often used to stand in amazement watching the rising Sun, motionless, his eyes fixed like a statue, to greet the return of the heavenly body. The Platonists, influenced by these and similar signs, would perhaps say that Socrates, inspired since boyhood by a Phoeboean daemon, was accustomed to venerate the Sun above all, and for the same reason was judged by the oracle of Apollo to be the wisest of all the Greeks. I will omit at present a discussion about whether the daemon of Socrates was particularly a genius or an angel - but I certainly would dare to affirm that Socrates in his state of ecstasy had admired not just the visible Sun, but its other, hidden aspect. For since novelty alone encourages admiration, why would Socrates be so amazed at what he saw everyday, whose movement and all power mathematics and physics have for a long time comprehended? According to Plato, he called the Sun not God himself but the son of God. And I say not the first son of God, but a second, and moreover visible son. For the first son of God is not this visible Sun, but another far superior intellect, namely the first one which only the intellect can contemplate. Therefore Socrates, having been awakened by the celestial Sun, surmised a supercelestial Sun, and he contemplated attentively its majesty, and inspired, would admire the incomprehensible bounty of the Father. James the Apostle called this Father the father of light; light, I say, more than celestial, in which there is no change or shadow. For he supposes that these supercelestial things are naturally mutable, that the many celestial things are doubtless shadowed in some fashion, and that sub-celestial things are shadowed daily. For which reason every very good thing naturally sown in the mind, every perfect gift beyond natural gifts, does not come down from this Sun and from the mundane stars, but from even higher, from the father of light. With the powers of the intelligence, as if by means of not celestial but super celestial steps, we raise ourselves beyond the heavens, to the place where we know, love and venerate many things superior to the heavens, and especially the Maker of heaven himself. In any case, with our intelligence we would not be able to understand anything at all incorporeal, superior to the heavens, if our intelligence only came to us from the heavens. However, lest anyone should admire and adore the Sun, Moon and stars too much and venerate them as creators and fathers of intellectual gifts, James prudently reminded us that this Sun is not the beginning of the universe. I will not explain now the reasons why, according to our theology, the origin of the universe cannot be either body, soul or intellect, but something infinitely loftier from which indeed the heavenly Sun is most distant, and of which the Sun seems more like a shadow than an image. Instead I shall briefly review here James's arguments.

Since stillness, as the first principle and end of movement is the most perfect of all movements, God, beginning and regulator of everything, cannot himself be in movement. The Sun is in motion every day. Moreover the power of the first principle, being immense, touches everything with its power and it cannot be restrained in any way. On the other hand, the force of the Sun, working through its rays, is variously impeded by the obstacle opposed to its rays, diminishes through the opposition of the Moon, is often held back by clouds, is pushed back by the density of the Earth, is weakened by spatial distance. The Sun itself is only a small part of the world; it is contained within a narrow space, it is pulled around from its sphere, it is always carried backwards from the sphere above against the motion of its own sphere, it is obstructed by contrary signs and adverse stars, and, if I may speak thus, weakened by aspects of the malefics. Lastly the first principle of the universe operates everything always, everywhere and in everything. The Sun on the other hand does not create the globes of the cosmos, nor can it affect whatever is cold or moist or dense, or similar things its own power. Nor if there are similar powers in the heavens, do they derive their origin from the Sun. Moreover although the Sun is exceedingly far removed from the Creator of the world, nevertheless all celestial things appear by divine law to lead back to the one Sun, the Lord and regulator of the heavens. And we are made fully aware from this that things which are in heaven, and under heaven, and above heaven, are similarly referred back to the one beginning of all things. And finally considering that, let us worship this one first principle with that same ritual observance that all celestial things give to the Sun.

Note: This translation is copyright and may not be reproduced without permission.

Notes

1. Ficino refers to the authorities below in the course of this text. We have not given the exact references to particular passages in their works: a more thorough critical edition prepared by the Company of Astrologers will be forthcoming.

a. Dionysius the Areopagite: Christian neo-Platonist, fl.350-500 AD. Ficino translated his Celestial Hierarchies and Divine Names.

b. Iamblichus of Chalcis: c.250-325 AD. Neo-Platonist more interested in the practical rites of theurgy than theoretical speculation. Ficino translated and commented on his De mysteriis Aegyptiorum.

c. Heraclitus: fl. c.500 BC. Greek sage who spoke in riddles. d. Proclus Diadochus: 4l0-485 AD. Head of the Athenian neo-Platonist school. Ficino translated his On sacrifice and magic.

e. Claudius Ptolemy: fI.121-151 AD. in Alexandria. Astronomer, astrologer and mathematician. [See paper On the Knowledge of Divine Things by Angela Voss in this volume].

f. Macrobius: fI.400 AD. Neo-Platonist whose Commentary on the Dream of Scipio was the most important source-book of Platonism in the Latin west.

g. Julian the Apostate: b.332 AD. Actively repudiated Christianity in favour of pagan rites and sun-worship. Ficino would have been familiar with his Hymn to King Helios.

h. Hipparchus: b.190 BC. Greek astronomer who improved the estimates of sizes and distances of Sun and Moon.

i. Averroes: Abu al-Walid Muhammed ibn Ahmad 1126-1198 AD. Islamic Spain's renowned philosopher, physician and astronomer best known in Medieval and Renaissance Europe for his Commentaries on Aristotle.

2. Ficino, Opera omnia (Basle 1576) 958

3. ibid. 965-975. This translation was completed by members of the Latin translation group of the Company of Astrologers, London.

4. See in particular, Orphica comparatione Sole ad Deum, Op.om. 825f.

5. Ficino, Theologia Platonica. Modern ed. trans. R. Marcel, Théologie Platonicienne de l'immortalité des âimes 2 vols. ( Paris 1964)

6. Haly: the Arabic astrologer Haly Abenrudian (Abu Jafar Ahmad b. Yusuf b. alDayah) fl.c.920 AD. His commentary on the Psuedo-Ptolemy Centiloquium was available in the Renaissance via the translation by Hugh of Santalla.

7. That is, a horoscope cast for the moment of the equinoxes and soltices.

8. Oriental: rising before the sun. Occidental: setting after the sun.

9. That is, when any planet is at the same degree and minute of longitude as the Sun's centre.

10. Retrograde: apparent backwards motion in the zodiac.

11. This is most likely to refer to the lunar node: the intersection of the lunar orbit with the ecliptic.

12. Ficino, Liber de vita. Modern ed. trans. C. Kaske & J. Clark Three Books on Life (Binghamton, New York 1989)

13. On the supposed translation by Ficino of the Orphic Hymns, see Marsilio Ficino et la Théologie Ancienne ed. I. Klutstein (Florence 1987)

14. Albumasar: Abu Ma'shar, 787-886 AD. Arabic astrologer who had become an authority in the Medieval period through his Greater Introduction to Astronomy, twice translated into Latin in the 12th century.

15. Apart from rulership, planets are strengthened in certain signs.

16. Ficino is referring to the solstices, when the Sun reaches its maximum north and south declinations.

17. Evidently an apocryphal work.

Two Magnificent Inspired Quotes From Johannes Brahms

"To realize that we are one with the Creator, as Beethoven did, is a wonderful and awe-inspiring experience. Very few human beings ever come into that realization and that is why there are so few great composers or creative geniuses in any line of human endeavor. I always contemplate all this before commencing to compose. This is the first step. When I feel the urge I begin by appealing directly to my Maker and I first ask Him the three most important questions pertaining to our life here in this world--whence, wherefore, whither? I immediately feel vibrations that thrill my whole being. These are the spirit illuminating the soul-power within, and in this exalted state, I see clearly what is obscure in my ordinary moods; then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above, as Beethoven did. Above all, I realize at such moments the tremendous significance of Jesus' supreme revelation, 'I and my Father are One'. Those vibrations assume the forms of distinct mental images, after I have formulated my desire and resolve in regard to what I want--namely, to be inspired so that I can compose something that will uplift and benefit humanity--something of permanent value. Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies and orchestration. Measure by measure, the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods, as they were to Tartini when he composed his greatest work--the Devil's Trill Sonata. I have to be in a semi-trance condition to get such results--a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance and the subconscious is in control, for it is through the subconscious mind, which is a part of Omnipotence, that the inspiration comes. I have to be careful, however, not to lose consciousness, otherwise, the ideas fade away."

Later in the same book, Brahms describes these experiences further to Abell and Joseph Joachim who was also present:

"I always have had a definite purpose in view before invoking the Muse and entering into such a mood; and as I pointed out to you before, contemplating what Goethe, Milton and Tennyson said stimulated by fantasy to a powerful degree. Then when I felt those higher Cosmic vibrations, I knew that I was in touch with the same Power that inspired those great poets and also Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Then the ideas which I was consciously seeking flowed in upon me with such force and speed, that I could only grasp and hold a few of them; I never was able to jot them all down; they came in instantaneous flashes and quickly faded away again, unless I fixed them on paper. The themes that will endure in my compositions all come to me in this way. It has always been such a wonderful experience that, I never before could induce myself to talk about it--even to you Joseph. I felt that I was, for the moment, in tune with the Infinite, and there is no thrill like it. I can understand why the great Nazarene attached so little importance to this life. He must have been in much closer rapport with the Infinite force of the Universe, than any poet or composer ever was, and He, no doubt had glimpses of that next plane, He called 'Heaven'."
~ From the book Talks with Great Composers

The Power of Names and Images

"By names and images are all powers awakened and reawakened."

- the Golden Dawn.
(Cal:480.)

Beethoven post-work ritual

This week I have been coming home from work exhausted, sat down online and put on one of Beethoven's symphonies.

It works a treat. These symphonies are the champagne of the soul. I feel a new man after listening to one.

Monday was public holiday (Australia Day).
Tuesday I heard the fourth symphony, which has been reported to give certain people spontaneous orgasms. I heard what they meant, but alas no orgasms.
Wednesday I heard the astonishing fifth, during which I fell of my chair in astonishment.
Thursday I heard the seventh; I whistled movement 1 on the way home today, Friday, realizing as I did how much more vital this music is than I am capable of comprehending.
Friday, tonight, I heard the first. I have never had much of a thing for his first. I like the low-key (compared to his own symphonies) opening.

I still have the second, third, sixth, eigth and ninth to listen to next week. How cool is that!?

Poem: In Conclusion

The spirit hungers for the real and true,
And nothing else will satisfy it.
But the manifest real and true
depends on the unmanifest
alone for its existence.

The hunger for experience
consumes the world in fire and light
until it comes at last
to the ontological void of the infinite,
then it consumes itself .

In a conflagration of the actual,
Like a moth bursting into flame
As it plunges into a candle,
Or like a man who loses his self
As he thrusts deep into his lover’s body –

This is the edge of the real itself,
the point at which dissolution and creation,
being and nonbeing,
actual and potential,
merge and are one.

Tree of Life Powers and Chant

A Simple Tree of Life Chant

The Kabbalist's tree of life can be spoken as well as drawn. Every sphere of the tree of life has 5 levels of consciousness, and a name for each level. The 5 levels for each of the 10 spheres are to 50 doors of knowledge.

The first 10 names are the names of God, showing a side of his face different for each plane of existance. The second are the sephirot, the soul of the univers, or the planes of existance themselves. The third are the names of the Archangels, rulers of the cosmos and the worlds of spirit. The fourth are the types of angelic aids available, and the fifth are the names of the physical/ethereal manifesation, or the intelligent planet spirits.



1- Eheieh
2- Iah
3- Yod He Vau He
4- El
5- Elohim Gibor
6- Eloha ve Da-ath
7- Yehovoh Tzebaot
8- Elohim Tzebaot
9- Shadaï El-Haï
10-Adonaï Melek


1- Kether
2- Hokmah
3- Binah
4- Hesed
5- Geburah
6- Tipheret
7- Netzah
8- Hod
9- Yesod
10-Malkut


1- Metatron
2- Raziel
3- Tzaphkiel
4- Tzadkiel
5- Kamael
6- Michael
7- Haniel
8- Raphael
9- Gabriel
10-Sandalphon


1- Hayot Ha-Kodesh
2- Ophanim
3- Aralim
4- Hachmalim
5- Seraphim
6- Malahim
7- Elohim
8- Beni-Elohim
9- Kerubim
10-Ischim


1- Reschit Ha-Galgalim
2- Mazaloth
3- Chabtaï
4- Tzedek
5- Maadim
6- Chemesch
7- Noga
8- Kohav
9- Lenava
10-Olam Yesodoth

Virtues on the Tree of Life

Eight Circuit Tree of Life

The Ecstacy of Influence

A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

—John Donne
LOVE AND THEFT

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.” The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth—to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience—in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into “Absolutely Sweet Marie”? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?

Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan's music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan's own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same might be said of all art. I realized this forcefully when one day I went looking for the John Donne passage quoted above. I know the lines, I confess, not from a college course but from the movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road with Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft. I checked out 84, Charing Cross Road from the library in the hope of finding the Donne passage, but it wasn't in the book. It's alluded to in the play that was adapted from the book, but it isn't reprinted. So I rented the movie again, and there was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but without attribution. Unfortunately, the line was also abridged so that, when I finally turned to the Web, I found myself searching for the line “all mankind is of one volume” instead of “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.”

My Internet search was initially no more successful than my library search. I had thought that summoning books from the vasty deep was a matter of a few keystrokes, but when I visited the website of the Yale library, I found that most of its books don't yet exist as computer text. As a last-ditch effort I searched the seemingly more obscure phrase “every chapter must be so translated.” The passage I wanted finally came to me, as it turns out, not as part of a scholarly library collection but simply because someone who loves Donne had posted it on his homepage. The lines I sought were from Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which happens to be the most famous thing Donne ever wrote, containing as it does the line “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” My search had led me from a movie to a book to a play to a website and back to a book. Then again, those words may be as famous as they are only because Hemingway lifted them for his book title.

Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October '38,” Waters said. “I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin' Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There's been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out—Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”

Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called “versions.” The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.

Visual, sound, and text collage—which for many centuries were relatively fugitive traditions (a cento here, a folk pastiche there)—became explosively central to a series of movements in the twentieth century: futurism, cubism, Dada, musique concrète, situationism, pop art, and appropriationism. In fact, collage, the common denominator in that list, might be called the art form of the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first. But forget, for the moment, chronologies, schools, or even centuries. As examples accumulate—Igor Stravinsky's music and Daniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon's paintings and Henry Darger's, the novels of the Oulipo group and of Hannah Crafts (the author who pillaged Dickens's Bleak House to write The Bondwoman's Narrative), as well as cherished texts that become troubling to their admirers after the discovery of their “plagiarized” elements, like Richard Condon's novels or Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermons—it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.

In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon, an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. “Animation is built on plagiarism!” declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of “plagiarisms” that links Ovid's “Pyramus and Thisbe” with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot's poem is a vertiginous mélange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser's “Prothalamion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser's most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot's use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton's maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud's psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud's theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.

Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy's The Moviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We're surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them.
USEMONOPOLY

The idea that culture can be property—intellectual property—is used to justify everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Corporations like Celera Genomics have filed for patents for human genes, while the Recording Industry Association of America has sued music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees from shop owners who play background music in their stores; students and scholars are shamed from placing texts facedown on photocopy machines. At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely fragile practices in a rapacious world. Plagiarism and piracy, after all, are the monsters we working artists are taught to dread, as they roam the woods surrounding our tiny preserves of regard and remuneration.

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. In this regard, few of us question the contemporary construction of copyright. It is taken as a law, both in the sense of a universally recognizable moral absolute, like the law against murder, and as naturally inherent in our world, like the law of gravity. In fact, it is neither. Rather, copyright is an ongoing social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly revised, and imperfect in its every incarnation.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, considered copyright a necessary evil: he favored providing just enough incentive to create, nothing more, and thereafter allowing ideas to flow freely, as nature intended. His conception of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution, which gives Congress the authority to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This was a balancing act between creators and society as a whole; second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea.

But Jefferson's vision has not fared well, has in fact been steadily eroded by those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other. The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law is its almost limitless bloating—its expansion in both scope and duration. With no registration requirement, every creative act in a tangible medium is now subject to copyright protection: your email to your child or your child's finger painting, both are automatically protected. The first Congress to grant copyright gave authors an initial term of fourteen years, which could be renewed for another fourteen if the author still lived. The current term is the life of the author plus seventy years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that each time Mickey Mouse is about to fall into the public domain, the mouse's copyright term is extended.

Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizarre and arbitrary. When old laws fixed on reproduction as the compensable (or actionable) unit, it wasn't because there was anything fundamentally invasive of an author's rights in the making of a copy. Rather it was because copies were once easy to find and count, so they made a useful benchmark for deciding when an owner's rights had been invaded. In the contemporary world, though, the act of “copying” is in no meaningful sense equivalent to an infringement—we make a copy every time we accept an emailed text, or send or forward one—and is impossible anymore to regulate or even describe.

At the movies, my entertainment is sometimes lately preceded by a dire trailer, produced by the lobbying group called the Motion Picture Association of America, in which the purchasing of a bootleg copy of a Hollywood film is compared to the theft of a car or a handbag—and, as the bullying supertitles remind us, “You wouldn't steal a handbag!” This conflation forms an incitement to quit thinking. If I were to tell you that pirating DVDs or downloading music is in no way different from loaning a friend a book, my own arguments would be as ethically bankrupt as the MPAA's. The truth lies somewhere in the vast gray area between these two overstated positions. For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of “intellectual property” leaves the original untouched. As Jefferson wrote, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Yet industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing, see the sale of culture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the record companies, who fear the cassette-tape manufacturers, who fear the online vendors, who fear whoever else is next in line to profit most quickly from the intangible and infinitely reproducible fruits of an artist's labor. It has been the same in every industry and with every technological innovation. Jack Valenti, speaking for the MPAA: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word “copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation's shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

A few years ago someone brought me a strange gift, purchased at MoMA's downtown design store: a copy of my own first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, expertly cut into the contours of a pistol. The object was the work of Robert The, an artist whose specialty is the reincarnation of everyday materials. I regard my first book as an old friend, one who never fails to remind me of the spirit with which I entered into this game of art and commerce—that to be allowed to insert the materials of my imagination onto the shelves of bookstores and into the minds of readers (if only a handful) was a wild privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three years of writing, but at the time I'd have happily published the results for nothing. Now my old friend had come home in a new form, one I was unlikely to have imagined for it myself. The gun-book wasn't readable, exactly, but I couldn't take offense at that. The fertile spirit of stray connection this appropriated object conveyed back to me—the strange beauty of its second use—was a reward for being a published writer I could never have fathomed in advance. And the world makes room for both my novel and Robert The's gun-book. There's no need to choose between the two.

In the first life of creative property, if the creator is lucky, the content is sold. After the commercial life has ended, our tradition supports a second life as well. A newspaper is delivered to a doorstep, and the next day wraps fish or builds an archive. Most books fall out of print after one year, yet even within that period they can be sold in used bookstores and stored in libraries, quoted in reviews, parodied in magazines, described in conversations, and plundered for costumes for kids to wear on Halloween. The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they've been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own—artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not “having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle”), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. “Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become “real” without being actively reworked: “Does it hurt?” Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: “It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure Planet, a legacy of cultural sampling that Shakespeare, or De La Soul, could get behind. Yet Disney's protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox—threatening legal action, for instance, against the artist Dennis Oppenheim for the use of Disney characters in a sculpture, and prohibiting the scholar Holly Crawford from using any Disney-related images—including artwork by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Oldenburg, and others—in her monograph Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art.

This peculiar and specific act—the enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit of a sole or corporate owner—is close kin to what could be called imperial plagiarism, the free use of Third World or “primitive” artworks and styles by more privileged (and better-paid) artists. Think of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or some of the albums of Paul Simon or David Byrne: even without violating copyright, those creators have sometimes come in for a certain skepticism when the extent of their outsourcing became evident. And, as when Led Zeppelin found themselves sued for back royalties by the bluesman Willie Dixon, the act can occasionally be an expensive one. To live outside the law, you must be honest: perhaps it was this, in part, that spurred David Byrne and Brian Eno to recently launch a “remix” website, where anyone can download easily disassembled versions of two songs from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an album reliant on vernacular speech sampled from a host of sources. Perhaps it also explains why Bob Dylan has never refused a request for a sample.

Kenneth Koch once said, “I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.” It was a charming confession, and a rare one. For so many artists, the act of creativity is intended as a Napoleonic imposition of one's uniqueness upon the universe—après moi le déluge of copycats! And for every James Joyce or Woody Guthrie or Martin Luther King Jr., or Walt Disney, who gathered a constellation of voices in his work, there may seem to be some corporation or literary estate eager to stopper the bottle: cultural debts flow in, but they don't flow out. We might call this tendency “source hypocrisy.” Or we could name it after the most pernicious source hypocrites of all time: Disnial.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

My reader may, understandably, be on the verge of crying, “Communist!” A large, diverse society cannot survive without property; a large, diverse, and modern society cannot flourish without some form of intellectual property. But it takes little reflection to grasp that there is ample value that the term “property” doesn't capture. And works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.

The cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange is that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade, and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don't want to be bothered, and if the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I'll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade. But a gift makes a connection. There are many examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions—marriage, parenthood, mentorship. If a value is placed on these (often essentially unequal) exchanges, they degenerate into something else.

Yet one of the more difficult things to comprehend is that the gift economies—like those that sustain open-source software—coexist so naturally with the market. It is precisely this doubleness in art practices that we must identify, ratify, and enshrine in our lives as participants in culture, either as “producers” or “consumers.” Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received. Even if we've paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us that has nothing to do with the price. The daily commerce of our lives proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration.

The way we treat a thing can change its nature, though. Religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. We consider it unacceptable to sell sex, babies, body organs, legal rights, and votes. The idea that something should never be commodified is generally known as inalienability or unalienability—a concept most famously expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .” A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. I don't maintain that art can't be bought and sold, but that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising. This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it's never really for the person it's directed at.

The power of a gift economy remains difficult for the empiricists of our market culture to understand. In our times, the rhetoric of the market presumes that everything should be and can be appropriately bought, sold, and owned—a tide of alienation lapping daily at the dwindling redoubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention to halt propertization is considered “paternalistic,” because it inhibits the free action of the citizen, now reposited as a “potential entrepreneur.” Of course, in the real world, we know that child-rearing, family life, education, socialization, sexuality, political life, and many other basic human activities require insulation from market forces. In fact, paying for many of these things can ruin them. We may be willing to peek at Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire or an eBay auction of the ova of fashion models, but only to reassure ourselves that some things are still beneath our standards of dignity.

What's remarkable about gift economies is that they can flourish in the most unlikely places—in run-down neighborhoods, on the Internet, in scientific communities, and among members of Alcoholics Anonymous. A classic example is commercial blood systems, which generally produce blood supplies of lower safety, purity, and potency than volunteer systems. A gift economy may be superior when it comes to maintaining a group's commitment to certain extra-market values.
THE COMMONS

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein's theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

Nearly any commons, though, can be encroached upon, partitioned, enclosed. The American commons include tangible assets such as public forests and minerals, intangible wealth such as copyrights and patents, critical infrastructures such as the Internet and government research, and cultural resources such as the broadcast airwaves and public spaces. They include resources we've paid for as taxpayers and inherited from previous generations. They're not just an inventory of marketable assets; they're social institutions and cultural traditions that define us as Americans and enliven us as human beings. Some invasions of the commons are sanctioned because we can no longer muster a spirited commitment to the public sector. The abuse goes unnoticed because the theft of the commons is seen in glimpses, not in panorama. We may occasionally see a former wetland paved; we may hear about the breakthrough cancer drug that tax dollars helped develop, the rights to which pharmaceutical companies acquired for a song. The larger movement goes too much unremarked. The notion of a commons of cultural materials goes more or less unnamed.

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

Artists and intellectuals despondent over the prospects for originality can take heart from a phenomenon identified about twenty years ago by Don Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago. He called it “undiscovered public knowledge.” Swanson showed that standing problems in medical research may be significantly addressed, perhaps even solved, simply by systematically surveying the scientific literature. Left to its own devices, research tends to become more specialized and abstracted from the real-world problems that motivated it and to which it remains relevant. This suggests that such a problem may be tackled effectively not by commissioning more research but by assuming that most or all of the solution can already be found in various scientific journals, waiting to be assembled by someone willing to read across specialties. Swanson himself did this in the case of Raynaud's syndrome, a disease that causes the fingers of young women to become numb. His finding is especially striking—perhaps even scandalous—because it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.

Undiscovered public knowledge emboldens us to question the extreme claims to originality made in press releases and publishers' notices: Is an intellectual or creative offering truly novel, or have we just forgotten a worthy precursor? Does solving certain scientific problems really require massive additional funding, or could a computerized search engine, creatively deployed, do the same job more quickly and cheaply? Lastly, does our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists?
GIVE ALL

A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran's finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were—and remain—rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger's rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted? The fertile spirit of stray connection—one stretching across what is presently seen as the direst of international breaches—had in this case been snuffed out. The cold, undead hand of one of my childhood literary heroes had reached out from its New Hampshire redoubt to arrest my present-day curiosity.

A few assertions, then:

Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of a rare success.

A corporation that has imposed an inescapable notion—Mickey Mouse, Band-Aid—on the cultural language should pay a similar price.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.

Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itself.

Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty.

The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? What would they be worth if some future Dylan worked them into a song? Should I care to make such a thing impossible?

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.
* * *
KEY: I IS ANOTHER

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in red. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.
TITLE

The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom's “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.
LOVE AND THEFT

“. . . a cultivated man of middle age . . .” to “. . . hidden, unacknowledged memory?” These lines, with some adjustments for tone, belong to the anonymous editor or assistant who wrote the dust-flap copy of Michael Maar's The Two Lolitas. Of course, in my own experience, dust-flap copy is often a collaboration between author and editor. Perhaps this was also true for Maar.

“The history of literature . . .” to

“. . . borrow and quote?” comes from Maar's book itself.

“Appropriation has always . . .” to “. . . Ishmael and Queequeg . . .” This paragraph makes a hash of remarks from an interview with Eric Lott conducted by David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, and incorporates both interviewers' and interviewee's observations. (The text-interview form can be seen as a commonly accepted form of multivocal writing. Most interviewers prime their subjects with remarks of their own—leading the witness, so to speak—and gently refine their subjects' statements in the final printed transcript.)

“I realized this . . .” to “. . . for a long time.” The anecdote is cribbed, with an elision to avoid appropriating a dead grandmother, from Jonathan Rosen's The Talmud and the Internet. I've never seen 84, Charing Cross Road, nor searched the Web for a Donne quote. For me it was through Rosen to Donne, Hemingway, website, et al.

“When I was thirteen . . .” to “. . . no plagiarist at all.” This is from William Gibson's “God's Little Toys,” in Wired magazine. My own first encounter with William Burroughs, also at age thirteen, was less epiphanic. Having grown up with a painter father who, during family visits to galleries or museums, approvingly noted collage and appropriation techniques in the visual arts (Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Stuart Davis), I was gratified, but not surprised, to learn that literature could encompass the same methods.
CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

“In 1941, on his front porch . . .” to “. . . ‘this song comes from the cotton field.'” Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.

“. . . enabled by a kind . . . freely reworked.” Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression. In Owning Culture, McLeod notes that, as he was writing, he

happened to be listening to a lot of old country music, and in my casual listening I noticed that six country songs shared exactly the same vocal melody, including Hank Thompson's “Wild Side of Life,” the Carter Family's “I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” Roy Acuff's “Great Speckled Bird,” Kitty Wells's “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” Reno & Smiley's “I'm Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” and Townes Van Zandt's “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.” . . . In his extensively researched book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll, Nick Tosches documents that the melody these songs share is both “ancient and British.” There were no recorded lawsuits stemming from these appropriations. . . .

“. . . musicians have gained . . . through allusion.” Joanna Demers, Steal This Music.

“In Seventies Jamaica . . .” to “. . . hours of music.” Gibson.

“Visual, sound, and text collage . . .” to “. . . realm of cultural production.” This plunders, rewrites, and amplifies paragraphs from McLeod's Owning Culture, except for the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals.

“In a courtroom scene . . .” to “. . . would cease to exist.” Dave Itzkoff, New York Times.

“. . . the remarkable series of ‘plagiarisms' . . .” to “. . . we want more plagiarism.” Richard Posner, combined from The Becker-Posner Blog and The Atlantic Monthly.

“Most artists are brought . . .” to “. . . by art itself.” These words, and many more to follow, come from Lewis Hyde's The Gift. Above any other book I've here plagiarized, I commend The Gift to your attention.

“Finding one's voice . . . filiations, communities, and discourses.” Semanticist George L. Dillon, quoted in Rebecca Moore Howard's “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.”

“Inspiration could be . . . act never experienced.” Ned Rorem, found on several “great quotations” sites on the Internet.

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted . . . out of chaos.” Mary Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein.

“What happens . . .” to “. . . contamination anxiety.” Kevin J.H. Dettmar, from “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism.”
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

“The surrealists believed . . .” to the Walter Benjamin quote. Christian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, a book that treats fannish fetishism as the secret at the heart of film scholarship. Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph Cornell's surrealist-influenced 1936 film Rose Hobart, which simply records “the way in which Cornell himself watched the 1931 Hollywood potboiler East of Borneo, fascinated and distracted as he was by its B-grade star”—the star, of course, being Rose Hobart herself. This, I suppose, makes Cornell a sort of father to computer-enabled fan-creator reworkings of Hollywood product, like the version of George Lucas's The Phantom Menace from which the noxious Jar Jar Binks character was purged; both incorporate a viewer's subjective preferences into a revision of a filmmaker's work.

“. . . early in the history of photography” to “. . . without compensating the source.” From Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of public advocates for copyright reform, and the best source if you want to get radicalized in a hurry.

“For those whose ganglia . . .” to

“. . . discourse broke down.” From David Foster Wallace's essay “E Unibus Pluram,” reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I have no idea who Wallace's “gray eminence” is or was. I inserted the example of Dickens into the paragraph; he strikes me as overlooked in the lineage of authors of “brand-name” fiction.

“I was born . . . Mary Tyler Moore Show.” These are the reminiscences of Mark Hosler from Negativland, a collaging musical collective that was sued by U2's record label for their appropriation of “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.” Although I had to adjust the birth date, Hosler's cultural menu fits me like a glove.

“The world is a home . . . pop-culture products . . .” McLeod.

“Today, when we can eat . . .” to “. . . flat sights.” Wallace.

“We're surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” This phrase, which I unfortunately rendered somewhat leaden with the word “imperative,” comes from Steve Erickson's novel Our Ecstatic Days.
USEMONOPOLY

“. . . everything from attempts . . .” to “defendants as young as twelve.” Robert Boynton, The New York Times Magazine, “The Tyranny of Copyright?”

“A time is marked . . .” to “. . . what needs no defense.” Lessig, this time from The Future of Ideas.

“Thomas Jefferson, for one . . .” to “‘. . . respective Writings and Discoveries.'” Boynton.

“. . . second comers might do a much better job than the originator

. . .” I found this phrase in Lessig, who is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who himself is characterizing a judgment written by Learned Hand.

“But Jefferson's vision . . . owned by someone or other.” Boynton.

“The distinctive feature . . .” to “. . . term is extended.” Lessig, again from The Future of Ideas.

“When old laws . . .” to “. . . had been invaded.” Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright.

“‘I say to you . . . woman home alone.'” I found the Valenti quote in McLeod. Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as ______ is to ________.
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

“In the first . . .” to “. . . builds an archive.” Lessig.

“Most books . . . one year . . .” Lessig.

“Active reading is . . .” to “. . . do not own . . .” This is a mashup of Henry Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Michel de Certeau, whom Jenkins quotes.

“In the children's classic . . .” to

“. . . its loving use.” Jenkins. (Incidentally, have the holders of the copyright to The Velveteen Rabbit had a close look at Toy Story? There could be a lawsuit there.)
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

“The Walt Disney Company . . . alas, Treasure Planet . . .” Lessig.

“Imperial Plagiarism” is the title of an essay by Marilyn Randall.

“. . . spurred David Byrne . . . My Life in the Bush of Ghosts . . .” Chris Dahlen, Pitchfork—though in truth by the time I'd finished, his words were so utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another's distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

“Kenneth Koch . . .” to “. . . déluge of copycats!” Emily Nussbaum, The New York Times Book Review.
YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

“You can't steal a gift.” Dizzy Gillespie, defending another player who'd been accused of poaching Charlie Parker's style: “You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.''

“A large, diverse society . . . intellectual property.” Lessig.

“And works of art . . . ” to “. . .

marriage, parenthood, mentorship.” Hyde.

“Yet one . . . so naturally with the market.” David Bollier, Silent Theft.

“Art that matters . . .” to “. . . bought and sold.” Hyde.

“We consider it unacceptable . . .” to “‘. . . certain unalienable Rights . . .'” Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane Radin's Contested Commodities.

“A work of art . . .” to “. . . constraint upon our merchandising.” Hyde.

“This is the reason . . . person it's directed at.” Wallace.

“The power of a gift . . .” to “. . . certain extra-market values.” Bollier, and also the sociologist Warren O. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is paraphrasing.
THE COMMONS

“Einstein's theory . . .” to “. . . public domain are a commons.” Lessig.

“That a language is a commons . . . society as a whole.” Michael Newton, in the London Review of Books, reviewing a book called Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book reviewers are another covert form of collaborative culture; as an avid reader of reviews, I know much about books I've never read. To quote Yann Martel on how he came to be accused of imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel Life of Pi,

Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York Times Review of Books [sic]. It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar. I forget the title, and John Updike did worse: he clearly thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review—one of those that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive . . . oozed indifference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise. . . . Oh, the wondrous things I could do with this premise.

Unfortunately, no one was ever able to locate the Updike review in question.

“The American commons . . .” to

“. . . for a song.” Bollier.

“Honoring the commons . . .” to

“. . . practical necessity.” Bollier.

“We in Western . . . public good.” John Sulston, Nobel Prize‒winner and co-mapper of the human genome.

“We have to remain . . .” to “. . . benefit of a few.” Harry S Truman, at the opening of the Everglades National Park. Although it may seem the height of presumption to rip off a president—I found claiming Truman's stolid advocacy as my own embarrassing in the extreme—I didn't rewrite him at all. As the poet Marianne Moore said, “If a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better?” Moore confessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others' work, explaining, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition.”
UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

“. . . intellectuals despondent . . .” to “. . . quickly and cheaply?” Steve Fuller, The Intellectual. There's something of Borges in Fuller's insight here; the notion of a storehouse of knowledge waiting passively to be assembled by future users is suggestive of both “The Library of Babel” and “Kafka and his Precursors.”
GIVE ALL

“. . . one of Iran's finest . . .” to “. . . meditation on his heroine?” Amy Taubin, Village Voice, although it was me who was disappointed at the door of the Walter Reade Theater.

“The primary objective . . .” to “. . . unfair nor unfortunate.” Sandra Day O'Connor, 1991.

“. . . the future will be much like the past” to “. . . give some things away.” Open-source film archivist Rick Prelinger, quoted in McLeod.

“Change may be troubling . . . with certainty.” McLeod.

“. . . woven entirely . . .” to “. . . without inverted commas.” Roland Barthes.

“The kernel, the soul . . .” to “. . . characteristics of phrasing.” Mark Twain, from a consoling letter to Helen Keller, who had suffered distressing accusations of plagiarism (!). In fact, her work included unconsciously memorized phrases; under Keller's particular circumstances, her writing could be understood as a kind of allegory of the “constructed” nature of artistic perception. I found the Twain quote in the aforementioned Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

“Old and new . . .” to “. . . we all quote.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. These guys all sound alike!

“People live differently . . . wealth as a gift.” Hyde.

“. . . I'm a cork . . .” to “. . . blown away.” This is adapted from The Beach Boys song “'Til I Die,” written by Brian Wilson. My own first adventure with song-lyric permissions came when I tried to have a character in my second novel quote the lyrics “There's a world where I can go and/Tell my secrets to/In my room/In my room.” After learning the likely expense, at my editor's suggestion I replaced those with “You take the high road/I'll take the low road/I'll be in Scotland before you,” a lyric in the public domain. This capitulation always bugged me, and in the subsequent British publication of the same book I restored the Brian Wilson lyric, without permission. Ocean of Story is the title of a collection of Christina Stead's short fiction.

Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who'd taken offense at Bellow's fictional use of certain personal facts, said: “The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.” I couldn't bring myself to retain Bellow's “strength,” which seemed presumptuous in my new context, though it is surely the more elegant phrase. On the other hand, I was pleased to invite the suggestion that the gifts in question may actually be light and easily lifted.
KEY TO THE KEY

The notion of a collage text is, of course, not original to me. Walter Benjamin's incomplete Arcades Project seemingly would have featured extensive interlaced quotations. Other precedents include Graham Rawle's novel Diary of an Amateur Photographer, its text harvested from photography magazines, and Eduardo Paolozzi's collage-novel Kex, cobbled from crime novels and newspaper clippings. Closer to home, my efforts owe a great deal to the recent essays of David Shields, in which diverse quotes are made to closely intertwine and reverberate, and to conversations with editor Sean Howe and archivist Pamela Jackson. Last year David Edelstein, in New York magazine, satirized the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case by creating an almost completely plagiarized column denouncing her actions. Edelstein intended to demonstrate, through ironic example, how bricolage such as his own was ipso facto facile and unworthy. Although Viswanathan's version of “creative copying” was a pitiable one, I differ with Edelstein's conclusions.

The phrase Je est un autre, with its deliberately awkward syntax, belongs to Arthur Rimbaud. It has been translated both as “I is another” and “I is someone else,” as in this excerpt from Rimbaud's letters:

For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the authors!

On Restitution to 'God', aka Tikkunim

Tikkunim
(Meditations on the Raising of the Sparks)
by the Baal Shem Tov

"All that a man has - his employees, his animals, his tools - all conceal sparks that belong to the roots of his soul and wish to be raised by him to their Origin."
The Baal Shem Tov

Tikkunim For Your Employees
1. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them when you also
speak to their muscles and minds.

2. When you speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them,
envision it rising up to its Source.

Tikkunim For Your Animals
1. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them when you speak to their animal hearts.

2. When you speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them,
envision it rising up to its Source.

Tikkunim For Your Tools
1. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them when you speak to their steel and stone.

2. When you speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside them, envision it rising up to its Source.


A Note on The Lurianic Theory of Creation and Redemption

The Lurianic and Sabbatian Kabbalah teach about a very dynamic process of self explication and self construction of the Absolute which as the process of tikkun (Restoration, or Universal Correction). The process of Tikkun is called "the repairing of the God's Face" because it corrects the existential break, or gap in the Absolute Being as such which is also a moment in His unfolding.

Adapted from http://www.kheper.net/topics/Kabbalah/tikkun.htm

A Basic Meditation Technique of the Kabbalah: Chanting the Name JHVH

The meditative techniques created by Abraham Abulafia and his followers are unusual in several respects. First, they are some of the clearest meditative techniques in all of the Kabbalah, and come with directions that even a beginner may understand. Second, unlike most classical writers on meditation, Abulafia generally explains precisely why the techniques work, based on his particular synthesis of Kabbalah and Maimonidean philosophy. Third, and unlike most of the Kabbalah, Abulafia's practices are clearly intended to bring about a particular mystical experience; they are not speculations on the cosmos, or elaborations on the commandments. Rather, they are recipes for experience.

Abulafian meditation may be unusual for Kabbalah, but in some ways it more closely resembles the mystical literature of other religions. Christian mysticism, for example, is often recorded in first-person narratives: I did this practice, contemplated in this way, and then had this experience. Likewise with Sufi mysticism, though the practices are often communal rather than individual. Kabbalah, however, is primarily composed not of similar first-person accounts, but of abstruse literature which may or may not be about direct experience. Today, there are excellent anthologies of Jewish "mystical testimonies" -- but these testimonies are not the primary form of Kabbalistic literature.

The truth is, they are not even primary in Abulafia's writings. What has happened, in the last forty years, is that Abulafia's meditation practices have been extracted from his books and presented as stand-alone exercises. In fact, when one actually opens Abulafia's books -- none of which has yet been translated into English -- one quickly sees that this extraction is a bit misleading, because Abulafia's prophetic techniques are tied to the type of prophecy one receives. In general, the techniques involve manipulation and permutation of the Hebrew language. What they bring about, in Abulafia's accounts and my own experience, is often a kind of stream of free association which plays within the concepts and words being permuted. Notice, though, that if you don't have the tools to interpret the "prophesies" you are receiving, they will be meaningless.

Suppose, for example, you are associating using gematria, the numerical equivalents of letters. Abulafia makes much of the equivalence of "Israel" with the term "Sechel Ha-Poal," which means Active Intellect. But if you don't know that 541 is the numerical value of each, or can't calculate gematria that quickly, then you may reach the end of the line very quickly. Or suppose you have a vision of certain letters, as you are rotating through the 72-letter name of God (really, the 216 letter name, comprised of 72 triads). This can be a beautiful experience, but without the tools to make sense of what you are seeing, an experience is all it is. It's ecstasy, but not prophecy.

For those dabbling in spiritual matters, or using meditation as a substitute for "getting high," experience is quite enough. This is why, I think, the term "ecstatic Kabbalah," which was used by certain scholars, is often used instead of "prophetic Kabbalah," which was used by Abulafia himself. Ecstasy is a diffuse experience; prophecy is particular. Ecstasy is focused on the escape from the world; prophecy on how the escape relates to the rest of life.

In the wake of the 1960s, whose mass spiritual phenomena were often focused entirely on escape and experience, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan publicized the teachings of Abulafia, demonstrating that the mystical practices that were attracting many Jews to Buddhism, Hinduism, and other "Eastern" religions were present right within Judaism itself. Kaplan had his own reasons for doing so. For our purposes, I simply want to make clear that the attainment of a mystical state is really only half of the "point" of Abulafia. We will focus on those techniques which work with very limited knowledge of Hebrew or Kabbalah, as did Kaplan. But for the other half of the project, which integrates the knowledge received in mystical states with the rest of the world, there is no way around actually learning the language, the symbols, and the terms of Judaism and Kabbalah.

One of Abulafia's simplest practices, popularized by Aryeh Kaplan, involves a series of head movements and breath, combined with pronouncing the Divine name.

The shortest version works by sounding out different Hebrew vowels together with the tetragrammaton (Y-H-V-H). When you do the practice, you'll want to sit comfortably in a place where you will not be disturbed, and allow the eyes to close. One begins with the first letter of the Divine name, Yood, and pronounces with the yood the vowels Oh, Ah, Ay, Ee, and Oo. Each vowel has a corresponding head movement, which resembles the way the vowel mark is written in Hebrew: with Oh the head moves up and back to center, Ah to the left and back to center, Ay to the right and back to center, Ee down and back to center, and then Oo forward, backward, and back to center. Move your head with the breath: on each inhale you move away from center, then on the exhale, pronouncing the sound, you move back. So, it looks a bit like this:

Inhale - move head upward
Exhale - move head back to center, pronouncing Yoh
Inhale - move head to the left
Exhale - move head back to center, pronouncing Yah
Inhale - move head to the right
Exhale - move head back to center, pronouncing Yay
Inhale - move head downward
Exhale - move head back to center, pronouncing Yee
Inhale - move head backward
Exhale - move head foreward, backward, center, Yoo

You then repeat that process with the letters Hey, Vav, and then Hey again.

There are many layers to this practice. On the esoteric level, notice that since you're permuting each letter of the Divine Name with each vowel, somewhere in there you have pronounced the ineffable name of God. On the more practical level, the complexity of this practice really focuses the mind. You can be thinking about mortgages, tests, and kids when you start, but in order to keep it straight, those thoughts just have to leave. Moreover, this is just the simplest level of the practice. As you develop, there are more and more complicated versions. One is to visualize the letters and vowels as you pronounce them. Another is to combine Divine names, such as YHVH and ADNY ("adonai"), and rotate through the vowel-sequence with the two names. You can even do one name backward and the other name forward.

Now, if this is approached as a sort of parlor trick, it's not very interesting or uplifting. But look closely at what Abulafia is doing: focusing the mind, and training the mind and body to work together. And all in a system that expertly pushes distracting thoughts away.

The results can be amazing. For example, there's a version of the practice above in which you rotate through the vowels on the exhale. Instead of just inhaling, you pronounce a vowel and move the head on the inhalation. So it sounds like "Oh-Yo... Oh-Yah..." etc., then "Ah-Yo, Ah-yah," then "Ay-yo, Ay-yah," and so on. The practice takes about twenty minutes, if you don't rush. Usually, when I finish it, I've really got YHVH in my head -- I can imagine the letters of the name imprinted on whatever else I'm seeing: trees, people, traffic jams. And that is the truth, isn't it? That the trees and people and cars are just the skin of the Divine? Isn't that the simple truth we've been trying to wake up to?

Adapted from: http://www.learnkabbalah.com/basic_meditation_techniques/

Wisdom Stories by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (Breslov)

The Turkey Prince
(The Man who Became a Turkey)

Once there was a prince who went mad and imagined that he was a turkey. He undressed, sat naked under the table, and abjured all food, allowing nothing to pass his lips but a few oats and scraps of bones. His father, the king, brought all the physicians to cure him, but they were of no use.

Finally, a wise man came to the king and said: I pledge to cure him.

The wise man promptly proceeded to undress and sat under the table next to the prince, pecking oats and heaving at scraps of bones, which he gobbled up.

The prince asked him:
'Who are you and what are you doing here?'

Said the wise man:
'Who are YOU and what are YOU doing here?'

The prince replied:
'I am a turkey.'

To which the wise man responded:
'I am a turkey too.'

So the two turkeys sat together until they became accustomed to one another. Seeing this, the wise man signaled to the king to fetch him a shirt. Putting on the shirt, he said to the prince:
'Do you really think that a turkey may not wear a shirt? Indeed he may, and that does not make him any less a turkey.'

The prince was much taken by these words and also agreed to wear a shirt.

At length, the wise man signaled to be brought a pair of trousers. Putting them on, he said to the prince:
'Do you really think that a turkey is forbidden trousers? Even with trousers on, he is perfectly capable of being a proper turkey.'

The prince acknowledged this as well, and he too put on a pair of trousers, and it was not long before he had put on the rest of his clothes at the wise man's directions.

Following this, the wise man asked to be served human food from the table. He took and ate, and said to the prince:
'Do you really think that a turkey is forbidden to eat good food? One may eat all manner of good things and still be a proper turkey "comme il faut".'
The prince listened to him on this too, and began eating like a human being.

Seeing this, the wise man addressed the prince:
'Do you really think that a turkey is condemned to sit under the table? That isn't necessarily so -- a turkey also walks around any place it wants and no one objects.'

And the prince thought this through and accepted the wise man's opinion. Once he got up and walked about like a human being, he also began behaving like a complete human being.


Translations and commentaries copyright © 2002, Lewis Glinert



THE LOST PRINCESS

I was on a journey, and I told a story that made everyone who heard it want to draw closer to God. And this is the story:

There was once a king who had six sons and one daughter. This daughter was especially dear to him. He loved her greatly and took the utmost delight in her.

One day when he was with her, he became angry with her. Suddenly the word s slipped out of his mouth: “Let the Evil One take you away!”

That night she went to her room, but in the morning no-one knew where she was. Her father was very distressed and he went searching for her everywhere.

Seeing how deeply troubled the king was, the Prime Minister rose and asked to be given an attendant, a horse and money for expenses, and he went off in search of her. He searched and searched for a very long time, until eventually he found her. This story is about how he searched for her until he found her.

For a long, long time he went from one place to another – through wildernesses, fields and forests, searching and searching.

While passing through a wilderness, he saw a path leading off to the side. He thought to himself: “I have been traveling in the wilderness for such a long time and I cannot find her. Let me try this path. Perhaps I will reach some habitation.”

He kept going for a long time. Finally, he saw a castle with many soldiers standing around it. The castle was very beautiful, and the troops were standing around it in fine order. He was afraid that the soldiers would not let him enter. But he thought to himself, “I'll go and try.” He left his horse and went to the castle.

They let him in without trying to stop him and allowed him to go from room to room. He came to a great hall and looked around. The king was sitting there with his crown. Before him were many soldiers and many singers with instruments. It was very, very beautiful there. Neither the king nor anybody else asked him anything.

He saw good food and delicacies. He ate and then went to lie down in a corner to see what would happen. He saw the king give an order to bring the queen. They went to bring her, and there was a great commotion and great happiness. The musicians played and sang as they brought the queen. They placed a chair for her and seated her by the king. It was the princess! The Prime Minister saw her and recognized her.

Afterwards the queen glanced and noticed someone lying in the corner. She recognized him. She rose from her throne and went over to him and touched him.

“Do you recognize me?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “I recognize you. You are the king's daughter, who was lost. How did you get here?”

“Because my father the king let that word out of his mouth,” she replied. “ This is the place of evil.”

He told her that her father was in terrible pain and had been searching for her for many years.

“How can I take you out?” he asked.

“It will be impossible for you to take me out,” she replied, “unless you choose yourself a place and stay there for a whole year. Throughout the entire year you must yearn to take me out. Whenever you have time, you must only yearn, long and wait to free me. And you must also fast. On the very last day of the year you must fast and you must not sleep for the entire twenty-four hours.”

He did as she said. At the end of the year, on the very last day, he fasted and did not sleep. He rose to go there. On the way he saw a tree with exceptionally beautiful apples. The sight was very tempting, and he stopped to eat. As soon as he ate the apple, he fell into a deep sleep.

He slept for a very long time indeed. His attendant tried to rouse him, but he did not wake up. Eventually he awoke, and asked his attendant:

“Where in the world am I?”

The attendant told the Prime Minister what had happened. “You have been asleep for a very long time – for many years. I have been living off the fruits.”

The Prime Minister was very pained. He went and found the king ' s daughter , but she complained to him bitterly:

“If you had come on that day you could have taken me out from here. And because of one day, you lost! It is true that not to eat is very hard indeed, especially on the last day, because then the evil urge attacks very strongly.”

The princess told him that she would now make it easier for him. He would not be required not to eat, because that is very hard to endure.

“Go back and choose yourself a place and stay there for another year. On the last day you may eat. Only you must not sleep, and you must not drink wine so that you do not sleep, because the main thing is not to sleep!”

He did as she said. On the last day he was on his way to her when he saw a flowing spring. It was red in color and had the smell of wine.

“Have you seen this spring?” he asked the attendant. “It should be water but it's red in color and smells of wine!”

He tasted from the spring and fell immediately into a deep slumber. He slept for many years – seventy years! Many troops passed by followed by their baggage trains and equipment. The attendant hid himself from the soldiers. Afterwards came carriages and a chariot, and there sat the king's daughter.

She stopped next to him and stepped down. She sat at his side and recognized him. She tried very hard to arouse him, but he did not stir. She started lamenting over him.

“He made such great efforts and tried so hard for so many years to free me, and because of that one day when he could have freed me, he lost his chance.”

She cried and cried.

“It's a terrible pity for him and for me. I have been here for such a long time and I can't get out.”

Afterwards she took the scarf from off her head and wrote on it with her tears. She laid it by his side, rose, sat in her chariot and left.

Afterwards he woke up. He asked the attendant: “Where in the world am I?” The attendant told him all that had happened – how many soldiers had passed by, and then a chariot. A woman had wept over him, crying out what a pity it was, both for him and for her.

Meanwhile he noticed the scarf lying at his side.

“Where is this from?” he asked.

The attendant told him that she had written on it with her tears. He picked it up and raised it towards the sun. He began to see letters. Written there he could read all her complaints and laments.

“…And now I am no longer in that castle. Instead you must search for a mountain of gold and a castle of pearls – there you will find me!”

The Prime Minster left the attendant and went off alone to search for her. He traveled for many years searching for her. He thought to himself:

“Certainly no mountain of gold with a castle of pearls exists in any inhabited area!” (He was familiar with geography.) “Therefore I will go to search in wildernesses!”

He went searching for her in wildernesses for many years.

Then he saw a huge man. He was so immense that he could not be considered a human being. He was carrying an enormous tree, the like of which would never be found in any inhabited area.

“Who are you?” asked the giant.

“I'm a man,” he replied.

The giant was very surprised. “I have been in the wilderness for such a long time and I have never ever seen a man here!”

The Prime Minister told him the whole story and that he was searching for a mountain of gold with a castle of pearls.

“Such a thing definitely does not exist,” said the giant. He discouraged the Prime Minister and told him he had been tricked with complete nonsense.

The Prime Minister began to cry and cry. “It definitely must exist somewhere !”

However, the giant discouraged him, saying, “You have certainly been told complete nonsense.” But the Prime Minister insisted that it definitely did exist.

The strange giant said to the Prime Minister: “In my opinion this is nonsense. But since you are so stubborn… I am in charge of all the animals. For your sake, I will call all the animals, since they roam around the whole world. Perhaps one of them know s of this mountain and castle!”

He called them all, from the smallest to the largest – all kinds of animals – and he asked them. But they all answered that they had not seen it.

“You see!” he told the Prime Minister, “they told you complete nonsense. Listen to me and go back, because you will definitely not find it. There is no such thing in the world.” But the Prime Minister persisted, saying, “It certainly must exist!”

The giant said to the Prime Minister: “ Deeper in the wilderness is my brother. He is in charge of all the birds. Perhaps they know since they fly high in the air. Perhaps they have seen that mountain and castle. Go to him and tell him that I sent you.”

The Prime Minister searched for him for many years . Again he found an immense giant carrying an enormous tree. He asked him the same questions and the Prime Minster told him the whole story and that his brother had sent him to him. The second giant also discouraged him. “Such a thing definitely does not exist”. But the Prime Minister insisted.

The second giant said to the Prime Minister: “I am appointed over all the birds. I will call them – perhaps they know.” He called all the birds and asked all of them from the smallest to the largest. They answered that they knew nothing of such a mountain and such a castle.

The giant said to the Prime Minister, “Can't you see? It quite definitely does not exist anywhere in the world! Listen to me and go back, for it certainly does not exist.” But the Prime Minister pressed him and insisted that it definitely must exist somewhere in the world.

The second giant said to the Prime Minister: “ Deeper in the wilderness is my brother, who is in charge of all the winds. They blow over the entire world – perhaps they know.”

The Prime Minister searched for many years, and found a man who was also immense and also carrying an enormous tree. He asked him the same questions and the Prime Minister told him the whole story. He too discouraged him, but the Prime Minister persisted.

The third giant said to the Prime Minister that for his sake he would call all the winds to come and ask them. He summoned them, and all the winds came. He asked all of them, but none of them knew of any such mountain or castle.

“Can't you see?” said the giant to the Prime Minister. “They told you complete nonsense!” The Prime Minister began crying and crying. “I know that it definitely exists,” he repeated.

In the meantime, he saw that another wind had arrived. The captain of the winds was very angry with this wind.

“Why have you come so late? Didn't I decree that all the winds must come? Why did you not come with them?”

But the wind replied: “I was delayed because I had to carry a princess to a mountain of gold and a castle of pearls.”

The Prime Minister was overjoyed.

The captain asked the wind, “What is precious there? What is considered valuable and important?”

“There,” he replied, “everything is very precious.”

The captain of the winds said to the Prime Minister: “You have been searching for her for such a long time and you've made so many efforts. In case you encounter any obstacle because of money, I am giving you a purse that you just put your hand into and take out money.”

He commanded the wind to take him there. The storm wind came and carried him there and brought him to the gate. There were soldiers standing there who would not let him enter the city, but he put his hand into the vessel and took out money and bribed them and went into the city.

It was a very beautiful city. He went to one of the wealthy citizens and paid for board knowing that he would have to stay there, as it would require great wisdom and intelligence to take her out.

How he freed her is not told, but in the end he took her out.

Sipurey Maasiot



THE HUMBLE KING

There was a certain king who had a wise man. The king said to the wise man:

“There is one king who signs himself as being ‘mighty, great and a man of truth and humility'. As for his being mighty, I know he is mighty because his kingdom is surrounded by the sea and in the sea stands a fleet of warships with cannons, which will not allow anyone to draw near. Inland from the sea is a deep moat that goes around the whole kingdom. To get in, there is only one tiny pathway wide enough for only one man, and there too stand cannons. If someone comes to make war, they fire with the cannons. It is impossible to get near.

“However, as for his signing himself ‘a man of truth and humility', I don't know. I therefore want you to bring me a portrait of that king.”

This was because this king had portraits of all the kings, but there was no portrait of that king in any king's collection. The reason was that he was hidden from everybody. He sat behind a veil, remote from the people of his country.

The wise man went to the country. He realized that he needed to find out the nature of the country. How do you find out the nature of a country? You find it out through the people's humor. When you want to know something, you should find out how people laugh and joke about it.

There are different kinds of jokes. Sometimes a person may really want to hurt another with words, but when the other takes exception to his words, he says, “I only meant it as a joke”. “Like one who exerts himself to cast firebrands and arrows… and then says, I am only joking” (Proverbs 26:18-19) . There are other times when a person may say something that is truly intended as a lighthearted joke, yet his friend is hurt by his words. Thus there are various different kinds of jokes and humor.

And among all the different kingdoms there is one kingdom that includes all kingdoms. In that kingdom is one city that includes all the cities of the entire kingdom that includes all kingdoms. In that city is one house which includes all the houses of the whole city that includes all the cities of the kingdom that includes all kingdoms. And there is one man who includes everything in that entire house. And there is also someone who produces all the mockery and joking of the kingdom.

The wise man took with him a large sum of money and went there and saw how they were mocking and joking in various ways. From the humor, he understood that the entire kingdom was full of lies from beginning to end. He saw the way they would joke about how people defrauded and deceived others in business, and how the injured party would sue in the lower courts where everything was lies and bribery. He would then go to a higher court, where everything was also lies. They used to put on comedies about all these kinds of things.

Through their humor the sage understood that the entire kingdom was filled with lies and deceptions and that there was no truth anywhere. He did some business in the kingdom, allowing himself to be defrauded in the transaction. He took the case to court, but the court was all lies and bribes. One day he would give them a bribe but the next day they would not recognize him. He went to a higher court, and there too it was all lies. Eventually he came before the Supreme Court, but they too were full of lies and bribery. Finally he came to the king himself.

When he came to the king, he said, “Who are you king over? The whole kingdom is full of lies from beginning to end and there's no truth in it.”

He began enumerating all the lies in the kingdom. When the king heard his words, he turned his ear to the veil to hear what he was saying. The king was surprised that there was anyone who knew about all the lies in the kingdom.

The ministers of state who heard what he was saying were very angry with him. Yet he went on telling about all the lies in the kingdom.

“It would be proper to say,” declared the wise man, “that the king too is like them – that he loves falsehood just as his kingdom does . But from this I see that you are a man of truth: you are far from them because you cannot stand the falsehood of the country.”

The wise man began to praise the king greatly. But the king was very humble, and “in the place of His greatness, there is His humility” ( Megilah 31a) . Such is the way of the humble person. The more he is praised and magnified , the smaller and humbler he becomes. Because of the sage's great praise, extolling and magnifying him, the king reached the utmost humility and smallness until he became literally nothing. He could not contain himself, and he threw aside the veil to see who this wise man was that knew and understood all this.

His face was revealed, and the sage saw it and brought his portrait back to the king.



THE RABBI'S ONLY SON

There was once a rabbi who had no children. Eventually he had an only son, and he raised and married him off . The son would sit in a room upstairs studying Torah, as was the way with those who were better off.

He would constantly study and pray. But he felt a certain lack within himself, though he didn't know what it was. He felt no real taste in his studies and prayers. He told this to two of his young friends, who advised him to visit a particular Tzaddik.

Now this son had performed a certain mitzvah that brought him to the level of the Small Light.

The son told his father that he felt no taste in his prayers and studies and that something was missing, though he didn't know what it was. Because of this, he wanted to visit that Tzaddik.

“What reason could you have to travel to him ?” asked his father. “Surely you are more learned than he is and you come from a better family. It is not proper for you to go to him. Don't follow this path.”

He thus prevented him from going, and the son returned to his studies. Yet he still felt the same lack. Again he took counsel with the same friends, who advised him, as before, to go to the Tzaddik. Again he went to his father, but the father dissuaded him and prevented him from going. The same thing happened several times.

The son felt he was lacking something, and he greatly yearned to satisfy his need, even though he did not know what it was. He came again to his father and pressed him to the point that the father had no option but to travel with him since he did not want to let his only son go alone .

The father said to him: “You see! I will go with you. I will prove to you that there is nothing of any substance in him.” They prepared the carriage and set off on their journey.

“I am going to make a test,” said the father. “If everything goes smoothly, it means this journey has been ordained by Heaven. But if not, it means it is not ordained by Heaven and we shall go back.”

They journeyed until they came to a small bridge. One of the horses fell , the carriage overturned and they almost drowned.

“You see!” said the father to his son. “Things are not going smoothly, and this journey is not ordained by Heaven.”

They turned back. The son returned to his studies, but again he felt that something was missing without even knowing what it was. He went back to his father and pressed him, and he was forced to go with him a second time. As they set off, the father once again set a test like the first time: “If everything goes smoothly…”

During the journey, it happened that two of the axles of the wheels of the carriage broke.

“You see!” said the father to his son, “Things are not going right. We are not supposed to make this journey. Is it natural for both axles to break? How many times have we traveled in this carriage and nothing like this has ever happened.”

They turned back. The son went back to his studies and once again felt that something was missing . His friends advised him to travel to the Tzaddik, and he went back to his father and pressed him until he was forced to travel with him again.

The son told him that this time they should not set any tests unless there was a very clear, visible sign, as it was quite natural for a horse to fall sometimes or for the axles to break .

They journeyed until they came to an inn for the night. A merchant got into conversation with them , as merchants do. They did not reveal their destination, because the rabbi felt ashamed to say he was traveling to that Tzaddik.

They discussed a variety of mundane topics, until the conversation came around to the subject of Tzaddikim and where they are to be found. The merchant spoke about a certain Tzaddik in one place and others in various other places, until they started to talk about the Tzaddik to whom they were traveling.

“Him?” said the merchant. “He's a lightweight. I am now on my way back from him. I was there when he committed a sin!”

The rabbi said to his son: “Do you see what this merchant is saying quite spontaneously without our even asking? Is he not on his way from there?!?”

They turned back and went home.

The son died. Afterwards he came to his father, the rabbi, in a dream. The father saw him standing there in great anger.

“Why are you so angry?” asked the father.

The son answered that he should journey to the same Tzaddik that he had wanted to visit. “He will tell you why I am angry!”

The father awoke and said it was pure chance. Afterwards he had the same dream again but he said that this too was a meaningless dream. Until it happened a third time and he realized that this was no empty matter, and he journeyed there.

On his way he met the same merchant that he had met previously when traveling with his son. He recognized him.

“Aren't you the one I saw in that inn?” he asked.

“You certainly did see me,” replied the merchant. He opened his mouth wide and said to him, “If you wish, I will swallow you up!”

“What are you talking about?” asked the rabbi.

“Do you remember when you journeyed with your son?” replied the merchant. “First a horse fell on the bridge and you went back. Afterwards the axles broke. After that you encountered me, and I told you he is a lightweight.

“Now that I have eliminated your son, you are free to travel. For he was on the level of the Small Light, while that Tzaddik is the Great Light. If they had met together, the Mashiach would have come. Now that I have got rid of him, you may travel.”

As he was speaking he disappeared, and the rabbi had nobody to talk to. The rabbi journeyed to the Tzaddik crying, “Woe! Woe! Woe for what is lost and cannot be found!”

May God quickly bring back our lost ones! Amen!

This merchant was the Angel of Death himself. He took on the guise of a merchant and deceived them. Afterwards, when he encountered the rabbi a second time, he himself rebuked him for listening to his advice. For that, as we know, is his way. May God protect us!



THE SOPHISTICATE AND THE SIMPLETON

Once there were two householders living in the same city. They were very wealthy and had large houses. Each had a son, and the two boys learned in the same school. One was very intelligent, while the other was simple. Not that he was foolish, but he had a straightforward, humble way of thinking.

These two boys loved each other greatly, despite the fact that one was sophisticated while the other was simple with a very humble mind.

As time passed, the two householders went into decline. They sank lower and lower until they lost everything and became poor. All they had left were their houses. The boys were growing, and their two fathers said to them: “We do not have the means to support you. Go and do whatever you choose.”

The Simpleton went and learned to be a shoe-maker. However the Sophisticate, who was highly intelligent, did not want to engage in such a simple craft. He decided to go out into the world and look around before deciding what to do.

He was wandering in the main street when he saw a large carriage drawn by four horses rushing through.

“Where are you from?” he cried to the merchants.

“From Warsaw ,” they replied.

“Where are you going?”

“To Warsaw !”

He asked them if they needed an attendant. They saw that he was intelligent and eager, and agreed to take him with them. He traveled with them and served them very well on the journey.

On arrival in Warsaw he thought to himself, since he was very intelligent: “Now that I'm already here in Warsaw , why should I remain tied to those merchants? Maybe there is somewhere better. Let me go and see what I can find.”

He went to the market and made enquiries about the men who had brought him and whether there might be some better opportunities. He was told that the merchants were decent and that it would be good to stay with them, but it would be hard, because their business took them to very distant places.

He went further and noticed the clothing-shop assistants going about with their stylish mannerisms, gait and clothing, their elegant hats and long pointed shoes. Being sharp and intelligent, he found this very appealing, particularly since one could stay in the same place without having to travel. He went to the men who had brought him and thanked them politely, telling them that he preferred not to remain with them. As for their having brought him, he had paid them with his service on the journey.

He took a position with a shopkeeper. New shop assistants had to accept low wages at first and do heavy work. Only later did they reach higher levels. The shopkeeper made him work very hard. He had to carry merchandise to wealthy customers the way shop assistants had to carry it, bending their hands under their elbows in order to hang the garment over their arm and shoulder. He found this work very onerous. Sometimes he had to carry heavy loads up steep flights of stairs, and the work was very hard for him.

With his intelligent, philosopher's mind, he thought to himself: “What do I need this work for? The ultimate goal is to get married and make a living. But I don't need to think about that yet. There will be time enough for that in years to come. The best thing for me now will be to travel the earth, visit different countries and feast my eyes on the world.”

He went to the market and saw merchants traveling in a big wagon.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To Lagorna!” they replied.

“Will you take me there?”

“Yes!”

They took him with them, and from there he went to Italy and then on to Spain . Several years passed and he became even cleverer, having been in many countries. He thought to himself: “Now I should focus on the main goal.”

With his philosophical mind he began to think what to do. He decided it would be a good thing to learn to work with gold. This was a prestigious and attractive craft requiring skill and wisdom, and it was also one that could bring wealth. Being highly intelligent and a philosopher, he did not need many years to learn the craft. In no more than a quarter of a year he acquired the necessary skill and became an outstanding craftsman. He was even more expert than the craftsman who taught him.

Afterwards he thought to himself: “Even though I have such a skill in hand, it is still not enough for me. Today this craft is prestigious, but perhaps at some other time another craft will be prestigious.” He took a position with a gem-cutter, and because of his deep understanding he learned this craft too in very little time – a quarter of a year.

Then he began philosophizing: “Even though I have two crafts in my hands, who knows? Perhaps neither of them will be prestigious. It would be good for me to learn a skill that will always be important. Using his intelligence and philosophy to examine the matter, he decided to study medicine since this is always in demand and prestigious. To learn medicine, one first had to learn Latin and how to write it , as well as science and philosophy. With his quick mind he learned this too in very little time – a quarter of a year – and he became a great doctor and philosopher and an expert in all fields of knowledge.

Afterwards the whole world came to be as nothing in his eyes, for because of his great wisdom as a master craftsman, sage and doctor, everyone else in the world seemed to him like nothing. He decided to pursue the main goal – to get married – but he said to himself:

“If I marry a woman here, who will know what has become of me? Let me go back home so that they will see what has become of me. I was a small boy, and now I have achieved such greatness!”

He journeyed home, but suffered greatly on the way. Because of his great wisdom, he had nobody to talk to. He could not find satisfactory accommodation, and he suffered very greatly.



Let us now set aside the story of the Sophisticate for a while and tell the story of the Simpleton.

The Simpleton learned how to make shoes, but because he was simple, it took him a long time before he grasped it. Indeed, he was not completely proficient in his craft, but he married and made a living from his work. Being simple, however, and not too proficient in his work, his living was very scanty. He did not even have time to eat since, not being fully proficient, he had to work constantly . As he worked busily, driving the awl through the leather, inserting the thick thread and drawing it through in the way shoemakers do, he would take a bite of bread.

He was always happy: he was simply full of joy all the time. He possessed every kind of food, drink and clothing. He would say to his wife: “My wife! Give me to eat!” She would give him a piece of bread and he would eat it. Afterwards he would say: “Give me beans and gravy.” She would cut him another slice of bread and he would eat it, praising the food. “This gravy is so beautiful! It is so good!”

He would ask her to give him meat and other good foods. For every kind of food that he requested, she would give him a piece of bread. He would take the most exquisite delight in it, highly praising the food – “So tasty! So good!” – as if he was actually eating that very food. And the truth is that when he ate the bread, he actually did taste each kind of food that he wanted, all because of his great simplicity and joy.

Likewise he would say to his wife: “Give me liquor!” She would give him water, and he would praise it highly. “What beautiful liquor this is! Give me honey mead!” She would give him water, and he would praise the mead. “Give me wine!” She would give him water, and he would enjoy it and praise it as if he was actually drinking the drink he had requested.

As for their clothes, he and his wife possessed one single thick sheepskin coat which they had to share. When he needed to wear an overcoat to go to the market, he would say, “My wife, give me the overcoat!” and she would give it to him. When he needed to wear a fine fur coat to make a social visit, he would say, “My wife, give me the fur coat!” She would give him the sheepskin and he would take great delight in it, praising it lavishly: “What a beautiful fur coat this is!”

When he needed a caftan to go to the synagogue, he would say to his wife, “Give me the caftan!” She would give him the sheepskin and he would praise it saying, “What a fine, beautiful caftan this is!” Similarly, when he needed to wear a silk coat, she would give him the sheepskin. He would praise it and take the utmost delight in it: “What a lovely, beautiful silk coat!” He was simply filled with joy and delight at all times.

When he finished making a shoe, it would all too often turn out triangular as he was not fully proficient in his craft. But he would take the shoe in his hand and praise it greatly. He would take enormous delight in it, saying: “My wife, how beautiful and wonderful this shoe is. How sweet this shoe is. This shoe is pure honey and sugar!”

“If so,” she would ask, “why do the other shoemakers take three gold coins for a pair of shoes while you only receive one and a half?”

“What do I care?” he would answer. “That is their work and this is my work! Besides , why do we need to speak about others? Let us work out how much clear profit I make on this shoe. The leather costs such and such; the glue, the thread , the filling cost such and such… In the end I make a profit of ten groschen! Why should I mind when I make such a profit.” He was simply filled with joy and delight at all times.

Most people considered him ridiculous and found him the perfect target for their scorn and derision, because he seemed like a madman. People would approach him and start a conversation for the sole purpose of ridiculing him. The Simpleton would say, “As long as you don't mock!” If they spoke without mocking, he would listen to what they had to say and engage in conversation.

He never tried to probe people's intentions too deeply, for this itself is a form of mockery. He was a simple person. If he saw that their intention was to mock, he would say, “So what if you are cleverer than me? Surely you will then be nothing but a fool. Am I so important that it is a great thing to be cleverer than me? If you are cleverer than me, you are a fool!”

All these were the ways of the Simpleton. Now let us return to the main story.



One day there was a huge commotion, for the Sophisticate was on his way home with great pomp and deep wisdom. The Simpleton also ran to meet him with tremendous joy. “Quick!” he called to his wife. “Give me the silk coat – I must go to meet my dear friend!” She gave him the sheepskin and he ran to meet him.

The Sophisticate was traveling in a horse-drawn carriage in magnificent style, and the Simpleton came to meet him full of joy, lovingly asking him how he was.

“My dear brother! How are you? Praise be to God for bringing you and granting me the privilege of seeing you!”

In the eyes of the Sophisticate, the entire world was as nothing – all the more so a man like this, who seemed like a madman. Still, because of their great boyhood love, he was friendly to him and journeyed with him into the city.

Now the two householders, the fathers of these two sons, had died during the time the Sophisticate had been traveling from country to country, but their two houses remained. The Simpleton, who had stayed at home, entered his father's house and inherited it. However, because the Sophisticate had been away, there had been no-one to take care of his father's house, which was in complete ruins. Nothing was left of it and he had nowhere to go when he arrived. He went to an inn, but he suffered there because the inn was not to his taste.

Now the Simpleton found a new occupation. He would run from his house to the Sophisticate, filled with love and joy. He could see how much he was suffering at the inn. The Simpleton said to the Sophisticate: “My brother! Come to my house and stay with me! I will put everything I have into one corner and the whole house will be at your disposal.” The Sophisticate liked the idea, and moved into the Simpleton's house and stayed with him.

The Sophisticate was constantly full of pain and suffering. He had a reputation for being an outstanding sage, a master craftsman and a doctor. A certain nobleman came and ordered a gold ring. The Sophisticate made a very wonderful ring engraved with extraordinary designs including an amazing tree. But when the nobleman came, he did not like the ring at all. The Sophisticate suffered terribly, because he knew that in Spain such a ring with a tree like this would be considered quite outstanding.

Another time a great nobleman arrived bringing a very expensive jewel from a far-off land. He also had another precious stone engraved with a certain design, and instructed him to engrave the same design on the jewel he had brought. The Sophisticate engraved exactly the same design on the jewel except that he made one change that nobody besides himself could possibly notice. The nobleman came and took the stone and was delighted, but the Sophisticate suffered terrible pain because of his mistake. “I have attained such a level of wisdom – how could I accidentally make a mistake?”

He also suffered in his medical practice. When he visited a patient, he would prescribe a medicine which he knew for certain would definitely cure the patient if he had any chance of survival, because it was an exceptional remedy. But if the patient afterwards died, people would say it was because of the medicine, and he suffered greatly because of this. Conversely he would sometimes treat a patient and the patient would be cured, but people said it was mere chance. Thus the Sophisticate was constantly full of misery.

It was the same when he needed a garment. He would summon the tailor and go to great lengths to explain to him how to make the garment exactly as he wanted in accordance with his deeper understanding. The tailor did exactly as the Sophisticate instructed him, making the garment just as he wanted it, with the exception of one lapel, where he went slightly wrong and failed to follow the instructions exactly.

The Sophisticate suffered terrible pain as a result. He knew that even though the garment was considered beautiful here, this was only because the local people had no understanding of tailoring. “If I was in Spain with this lapel, I would be the laughing stock of all!” Thus it was that he was constantly full of suffering.

Each time the Simpleton would come running to the Sophisticate full of joy, only to find him miserable and wracked with pain.

“Why should someone as wise and wealthy as you are endure constant suffering?” asked the Simpleton. “Look at me – I am constantly full of joy!”

However in the eyes of the Sophisticate, the Simpleton was ridiculous and seemed like a madman.

“If most people ridicule me,” said the Simpleton, “surely they are the fools. For if they are wiser than me, on the contrary – they are fools. This applies all the more to a wise man like you. What will it make you if you are wiser than me? If only…” concluded the Simpleton, “…if only you could reach my level!”

“It is quite possible,” replied the Sophisticate, “that I could come to your level – if Heaven forbid my intelligence was taken from me or if I became ill, in which case I might go mad. For what are you if not a madman? But for you to come to my level would be quite impossible. There is no way that you could become wise like me.”

But the Simpleton replied: “For God, everything is possible. It might be that I could reach your level in the wink of an eye!”

The Sophisticate simply laughed at him.



In the wider world these two friends were known as the Sophisticate and the Simpleton. Although the world contains many sophisticated and many simple people, nevertheless the traits of sophistication and simplicity were particularly evident in the case of these two. They were both from the same place and had learned together. One had become exceptionally wise and sophisticated while the other was exceptionally simple and straightforward. In the Population Registry, where everyone is inscribed with his family name, the one was registered as “The Sophisticate” and the other as “The Simpleton”.

Once the king paid a visit to the Population Registry and found these two individuals registered respectively as “The Sophisticate” and “The Simpleton”. The king had a great desire to see them. He thought to himself:

“If I suddenly send for them to appear before me, they will be very frightened. The Sophisticate will be tongue-tied and unable to express any of his arguments, while the Simpleton might go out of his mind through fear.”

The king decided to send a sophisticated messenger to the Sophisticate and a simple messenger to the Simpleton. The problem was how to find a simple person in the capital city, where people are mostly very sophisticated. Only the officer over the treasuries is chosen specifically for his simplicity and honesty, since nobody wants a sophisticate in charge of the treasuries. His very sophistication and intelligence could lead him to waste all the resources. For this reason a simple, honest person is chosen as the officer in charge of the treasuries.

The king summoned a sophisticated individual together with the simpleton who was in charge of the treasuries and he sent them to the Sophisticate and the Simpleton. The king gave letters to each of the two messengers together with a letter to the governor of the local province under whose jurisdiction the two lived.

In his letter to the provincial governor, the king gave instructions to send the letters to the Sophisticate and the Simpleton under the governor's name, in order that they should not panic. He was to write to them that there was no urgency and the king was not specifically ordering them to come. It was up to them to do as they wished. If they so desired, they were to come – but the king wished to see them.

The two messengers, one sophisticated and the other simple, traveled to the local province and gave the letter to the governor . The governor enquired about the Sophisticate and the Simpleton. He was informed that the Sophisticate was exceptionally wise and very wealthy, while the Simpleton was extremely simple and straightforward, having only one sheepskin to serve for every kind of dress…

The governor realized that it would certainly not be proper to bring him before the king wearing the sheepskin, so he had proper clothes made for him which he placed in the carriage that was to collect the Simpleton. He gave the messengers the letters and they traveled there and handed them the letters. The sophisticated messenger delivered his letter to the Sophisticate, while the simple messenger gave the Simpleton his.

On receiving the letter, the Simpleton immediately said: “But I don't know what's written in it – read it to me!”

“I'll tell you what it says,” replied the messenger. “The king wants you to come to him.”

“As long as you're not joking,” said the Simpleton.

“Certainly not,” said the messenger. “It's true! No joking.”

The Simpleton was immediately filled with joy and ran to tell his wife.

“My wife, the king has sent for me!”

“Why?” she asked. “For what purpose?”

But the Simpleton had no time to answer her and rushed away happily to set off with the messenger. He climbed into the carriage and sat down. When he discovered the clothes, he was even happier.

In the meantime information about misdemeanors on the part of the governor reached the king, who removed him. The king came to the conclusion that it would be best to have a simple, honest person as governor since such a person would run the province truthfully, knowing nothing of sophistication and deceit.

The king decided to appoint the Simpleton as governor, and issued a decree to that effect. In any case the Simpleton had to travel via the provincial capital. They were to wait for him at the gates of the city. On his arrival they were to stop him immediately and inaugurate him as governor. They waited at the gates and as soon as the Simpleton arrived, they stopped him and told him that he had been appointed governor.

“You're not joking?” he asked.

“Certainly not – no joking!” they replied. The Simpleton immediately took up the position of governor with all force and strength.

And now that his fortune was on the rise – and good fortune makes a person wise – he attained greater understanding, even though he did not make use of his wisdom at all, conducting himself with his usual simple honesty . He governed the province sincerely and honestly, truthfully and fairly, without a trace of corruption.

To run a province, there is no need for great intelligence and sophistication but only fairness, simplicity and sincerity. When two people appear ed before him in a law case, he would declare, “You are guilty and you are innocent,” in simple honest truth without craftiness or deceit. He conducted himself truthfully and honestly in everything.

The people of the province adored him, and he had advisers who truly loved him. Out of love, one of them gave him some advice:

“You will quite definitely be called to come before the king. He has already summoned you, and in any case the governor is obliged to appear before the king. Although you are very honest and run the province without any trace of corruption, the way of the king is to steer the conversation to deep ideas and foreign languages. Out of propriety and politeness you ought to be able to answer him. It would be a good idea for me to teach you some philosophical ideas and foreign languages.”

The Simpleton saw that this was a good suggestion, and said, “Why should I mind if I learn some deep ideas and languages?” He immediately recalled that his friend the Sophisticate had told him it would be quite impossible for him ever to reach his level – yet now he had already attained his wisdom. Even so, despite his already having attained a grasp of sophisticated wisdom, he made no use of sophisticated ideas at all. He conducted himself in all things with his usual honest simplicity.

Afterwards the king summoned the Simpleton-Governor. He traveled to the king, who discussed with him the government of the province. The Simpleton made a very good impression on the king, who saw that he governed with great justice and truth and without any corruption or deceit. The king then began discussing deep ideas and foreign languages. The Simpleton gave the appropriate answers, which particularly impressed the king, who said, “I see that he is so very wise, yet even so he governs with such honest simplicity.”

This found very great favor in the eyes of the king, who appointed the Simpleton as Minister-in-Chief over all his other ministers. The king designated a special place for his residence, giving instructions to build him a fitting palace of great beauty and splendor. He gave him a written certificate attesting to his appointment as Minister-in-Chief over all the other ministers. And so it was: they built him a residence in the very place the king had designated, and he became very great and powerful.



As for the Sophisticate, when the king's letter arrived, he said to the sophisticated messenger who brought it: “Wait! Stay here tonight and we will give the matter careful consideration.” That evening he made him a great feast, during which the Sophisticate applied his wisdom and philosophy with the utmost sophistication.

“What is this?” he asked. “The king has sent for me ? For a lowly creature like me??? What am I that the king should send for me? The king is so great and powerful. I am lowly and despicable compared with such a great and awesome king. It makes no sense that such a king should send for a lowly creature like me. If I say it is because of my wisdom, what am I compared to the king? Does the king not have wise men? Moreover, the king himself must certainly be very wise. Why would the king send for me?”

The Sophisticate was very perplexed. He said to the king's sophisticated messenger: “Mark my words. In my opinion it is quite logical and obvious that there really is no king in the world at all. Everyone is mistaken about this nonsense, because they think there is a king. Consider: how is it possible that all the people in the world would subject themselves to one man to be their king? Without any doubt, there is no king over the world at all.”

“But did I not bring you a letter from the king?” replied the sophisticated messenger.

“Did you yourself actually receive the letter from the hand of the king himself?” asked the Sophisticate.

“No,” replied the messenger, “Someone else gave me the letter in the king's name.”

“You see!” cried the Sophisticate. “What I'm saying is right: there is no king at all.” He questioned him further: “You yourself come from the capital city – you grew up there and you've lived there all your life. Tell me: have you ever seen the king in your whole life?”

“No,” replied the messenger – because the truth is that not everyone gets to see the king, who appears only very rarely.

“You see!” cried the Sophisticate. “You see! What I am saying is perfectly correct. There is definitely no king at all. Even you have never seen the king.”

“If so,” asked the sophisticated messenger, “who runs the country?”

“I will explain that to you quite clearly,” replied the Sophisticate, “because I am the right person to ask as I have traveled in many countries. I was in Italy , where they have seventy advisory ministers, each of whom governs the country for a set period of time. This way everyone in the land has a turn at running the country, one after the other…”

His words began to penetrate the ears of the sophisticated messenger until they both agreed and declared that “There is certainly no king over the world at all!”

“Wait until morning,” cried the Sophisticate. “I will give you proof after proof that there is no king in the world at all.”

The Sophisticate rose early the next morning and woke up his friend the sophisticated messenger, saying: “Come outside with me. I will prove to you clearly that the entire world is in error. The truth is that there is no king at all and they are all greatly mistaken.”

They went to the market and saw a soldier. They grabbed him and asked him:

“Who m do you serve?”

“The king,” he replied.

“Have you ever seen the king in your life?”

“No.”

“You see!” said the Sophisticate. “Is there any greater folly?”

Next they approached an army officer and entered into a conversation with him.

“Who m do you serve?” they asked.

“The king,” he replied.

“Have you ever seen the king?”

“No.”

“You can see it with your own eyes,” cried the Sophisticate. “It is perfectly clear that they are all mistaken and there is no king in the world at all.”

They both agreed that there was no king at all.

“Come!” cried the Sophisticate. “Let us travel the world and I will give you further proof that the whole world is greatly mistaken.”

They went off and traveled the world. Wherever they went, they found everyone to be in error. They started using the idea of the king as an example. Wherever they found people to be mistaken about anything, they cited the idea of the king as an example. “This misconception is as true as the idea that there is a king!”

They continued traveling until they had used up everything they had. First they sold one horse and then another, until they had sold them all and were forced to go on foot. They were constantly questioning everyone and finding them to be in error. They went about on foot, impoverished, disrespectable beggars to whom no- one paid any attention.

They went around until they came to the city where the Minister – the Simpleton – lived. In the same town lived a true miracle worker, who was very highly respected as he performed extraordinary wonders. He was even known and respected by the leading ministers.

When these two sophisticates arrived in the town, they wandered around until they came to the house of the miracle worker. They saw numerous carriages waiting there, as many as forty or fifty, with sick people. The Sophisticate inferred that it must be the house of a doctor. He wanted to enter and make his acquaintance, as he himself was a great doctor.

“Who lives here?” he asked.

“The miracle worker,” they replied.

The Sophisticate burst out laughing and said to his friend, “This is a most exceptional falsehood and error. This is even more foolish than the mistake about the king. My friend, let me explain what a lie this is and how greatly mistaken the world is about such deceit.”

Meanwhile they became hungry. They found that they still had three or four coins, so they went to a cook shop where one could get food for as little as three or four coins. They ordered, and the food was brought to them.

As they ate, they chatted and joked about the lie and error about the miracle worker. The owner of the cook shop heard what they were saying and became very angry, because the miracle worker was highly respected there. “Finish your food,” he cried, “and get out of here.”

Afterwards the miracle worker's son arrived. They continued joking about the miracle worker in front of his son. The owner of the cook shop scolded them for joking about the miracle worker in front of his son. He gave them a good beating and threw them out of his house.

They were extremely angry and wanted to sue the man who beat them. They decided to go to the owner of their lodgings, where they had left their bundles of belongings, to ask him how to start legal proceedings. They told him that the owner of the cook shop had given them a severe beating. When he asked them why, they told him that they had spoken against the miracle worker.

“It is certainly not right to beat people,” replied the owner of the lodgings. “But you did not do the right thing at all in speaking against the miracle worker. He is very highly respected here.”

They saw that the owner of the lodgings was a nothing and that he too was in error. From there they went to the town clerk, who was a gentile. They told him the story of how they had been beaten. “Why?” he asked. They answered that they had spoken against the miracle worker. The town clerk also gave them a severe beating and threw them out of his house.

They went from one officer to the next, higher and higher, until they came to the Minister-in-Chief. Troops were standing guard in front of his house. The minister was informed that a man needed to see him and he gave orders for him to enter.

As soon as the Sophisticate entered, the Minister recognized him as his friend the Sophisticate. However, the Sophisticate did not recognize the Simpleton now that he had attained such greatness. The Minister immediately said to him:

“See where my simplicity has brought me – to such greatness. And where has your wisdom brought you?”

“As to your being my friend the Simpleton,” replied the Sophisticate, “let us talk about that later. But now I demand justice, because they beat me.”

“Why?” asked the Minister.

“Because I spoke out against the miracle worker,” replied the Sophisticate, “because it's a lie and a big deception”.

“So you still hold by your sophisticated ideas?” said the Simpleton-Minister. “You see! You said that you could easily attain my level but that I could not attain your level. Yet I have already reached your level of wisdom, whereas you have still not reached my level. I see that it is harder for you to attain my simple honesty!”

Even so, since he knew him from before when he was at the height of his greatness, the Minister gave orders to give him clothes and invited him to eat with him.

As they ate they started talking, and the Sophisticate began proving his opinion that there is no king at all. The Minister rebuked him.

“Haven't I myself seen the king?”

The Sophisticate answered him with a laugh. “Do you really know that it was the king? Did you recognize him? Did you know for sure that his father and grandfather were kings? How do you know that this was the king? People told you this was the king – they deceived you with a lie.”

The Simpleton was very angry over the Sophisticate's denial of the king's existence.

In the meantime someone came and said: “The Devil has sent for you.”

The Simpleton was extremely shaken. He ran in great trepidation to his wife to tell her who had sent for him. She advised him to send for the miracle worker. He did so, and the miracle worker came and gave him amulets and other protection, telling him that he now had no reason to fear. The Simpleton had great faith in this.

The Simpleton carried on sitting with Sophisticate, who asked him: “What made you so frightened?”

“It was because of the one that sent for us.”

The Sophisticate laughed at him. “Do you really believe there is such a thing as the Devil?”

“If not, then who sent for us?”

“It must be my brother!” replied the Sophisticate. “He wants to see me and he played this trick to send for me.”

“If so,” asked the Simpleton, “how did he get through all the guards?”

“He must have bribed them, and they are all lying, saying they never saw him at all.”

Meanwhile someone else came and said the same thing: “The Devil has sent for you.”

The Simpleton was now unshaken. He was not afraid at all because of the protection given by the miracle worker.

“Now what do you say?” he asked the Sophisticate.

“I must inform you,” replied the Sophisticate, “that I have a brother who is angry with me. He is playing this trick in order to frighten me.”

The Sophisticate stood up and said to the messenger who came for them: “What does he look like – the one who sent for us? What kind of face does he have? What kind of hair…?”

The messenger described him.

“See!” cried the Sophisticate. “That is exactly what my brother looks like.”

“Will you go with them,” asked the Simpleton.

“Yes!” replied the Sophisticate. “Just give me some soldiers to go with me so that they don't hurt me.”

The Minister provided him with an escort of soldiers, and the Sophisticate and his friend, the sophisticated messenger, went off with the man who had summoned them. Afterwards the soldiers returned.

“Where are those sophisticates?” asked the Minister.

The soldiers replied that they had disappeared – they had no idea how.

For the Devil had kidnapped these two sophisticates and brought them to the muddy bog. The Devil sat on a throne in the bog and threw the sophisticates into the mud. The mud was thick and sticky like clay.

As the two sophisticates were tortured, they screamed out:

“You wicked villains! Why are you torturing us? Does such a thing as the Devil really exist? You are wicked villains, torturing us for nothing!”

These sophisticates still did not believe that such a thing as the Devil really exists. They thought that evil men were torturing them for no reason. The two sophisticates lay there in the thick mud trying to understand what was happening.

“They are nothing but wild ruffians we quarreled with once, and now they are torturing us so much!”

They suffered terrible tortures for many years.



Once the Simpleton-Minister was passing by the miracle worker's house and he remembered his friend the Sophisticate. He came before the miracle worker and bowed, as noblemen do. He asked him if it would be possible for him to see the Sophisticate and if there was a way to release him.

“Do you remember the Sophisticate that the Devil summoned and took away?” he asked. “I have not seen him ever since.”

“Yes,” replied the miracle worker.

The Minister asked him to show him where he was and to release him. The miracle worker replied: “I can certainly show you where he is and take him out, but no- one must go except me and you.”

They went together and with the miracle worker' s help they came to the place.

There they were, lying in the thick mud and quicksand. When the Sophisticate saw the Minister, he screamed out: “My brother! See how these wicked villains are beating and torturing me so terribly over nothing!”

The Minister rebuked him. “You still cling to your sophisticated ideas and you don't believe in anything. According to you, these are human beings. Now see! Isn't this the miracle worker that you denied? Yet he, and only he, has the power to release you. He will show you the truth.”

The Minister asked the miracle worker to take them out and show them that this was the Devil and his cohorts, and not human beings.

The miracle worker released them , and they were left standing on dry land. There was no mud there at all. The destroying angels turned into mere dust.

The Sophisticate saw it all, and he was forced to admit to the truth, that there is a king.




THE EXCHANGED CHILDREN

This is a story about a certain king who had a maid in his palace who attend ed the queen. Obviously a mere cook would not have been allowed in to the king, but this maid was an attendant of low rank. The queen gave birth and this maid also gave birth at the same time. Then the midwife went and switched the babies around – just to see what would happen and how it would turn out. She took the king's son and put him beside the maid, and she placed the maid's son beside the queen.

As time went on these children began to grow. The “king's son” (the one who grew up with the king because they thought he was the king's son) was helped to rise from level to level, becoming ever greater until he was a most important personage. The “maid's son” (who was really the king's son, but he grew up with the maid) was raised in the servant's house.

Nevertheless, the two boys learned together in the same school. The king's true son, who was known as the “maid's son”, was naturally drawn to royal behavior even though he grew up in the servant's house. Conversely, the maid's true son, who was called “the king's son”, was naturally drawn to a different kind of behavior unlike that of royalty. But having grown up in the king's palace, he was forced to conduct himself royally because that was how he was raised.

Now the midwife – since women can be light-headed – told someone the secret of how she had switched the children. “Every friend has a friend,” and the secret passed in the usual way from one person to another until everyone was whispering about how the king's son had been exchanged.

It was impossible for anyone to talk about it openly in case the king found out. It was quite impossible to let the king find out. What would he be able to do? There was no solution. It was impossible to give credence to a mere rumor – it might be false. In any case, how could they switch the two sons back into their proper positions? They therefore could not reveal the matter to the king. Yet people continued talking about it among themselves.

One day somebody revealed the secret to the “king's son” (who was in reality the maid's son), telling him that people were saying he had been exchanged.

“But you cannot investigate this,” said the man who told him the secret. “It would be beneath your dignity. You therefore cannot go into the matter at all. I am only telling you this in case there is a conspiracy against you one day that might gain strength because of this rumor. People will say they want to take the king's son as king – the one they say is the king's true son. You will have to think about how to deal with him and see how to remove him.”

Wherever this story speaks about the “king's son”, it refers to the one who grew up with the king and was called the “king's son” though in fact he was the maid's true son. Conversely, the one that grew up as the “maid's son” was really the king's true son.

The “king's son” began making trouble for the servant who was regarded as the “father” of the other son although in fact he was his own true father. The “king's son” fired every kind of trouble in his direction, one after the other, in order to force him to flee together with his son.

As long as the king was alive, his “son” did not have much power yet was still able to cause him troubles. Eventually the king became old and died, and the “king's son”, who was the maid's true son, took over the kingdom. He then caused even more trouble for the servant who was regarded as the “father” of the other son. He sent trouble after trouble – but craftily, so that people would not understand that he was the one causing the trouble, since this would not look good in the eyes of the people. He therefore hid what he was doing but caused him constant troubles.

The servant realized that the king was causing him troubles because of the rumors about the exchange. The servant explained the whole story to his “son” (who was in reality the king's true son) . He told him that he g reatly pitied him.

“However you look at it, if you are my son, I certainly have pity on you. And if you are the king's true son, you deserve even greater pity, because he wants to remove you completely, heaven forbid. For this reason you have no option but to move from here.” He felt very bad about this.

However the king was constantly shooting his evil arrows one after the other, and the other son decided to move away. His “father” gave him a sum of money and he left. He felt very bad indeed about having been driven from his own country for nothing.

“Why do I deserve to be banished?” he asked himself. “If I am the king's son I certainly don't deserve it. And even if I am not the king's son, I also don't deserve to have to flee for no reason. What sin did I commit?”

He felt very bad about it. He started drinking and visiting the brothel. He wanted to spend all his days getting drunk and following his heart's desires after having been banished for nothing.

Meanwhile the king took up the reins of power with great force. Whenever he heard that people were whispering and talking about the exchange, he took vengeance and punished them very severely, ruling with power and strength.

One day the king went on a hunting expedition with his ministers. They came to a beautiful place with a flowing river. They stayed there to rest and stroll around. The king lay down to rest, and began thinking about how he had banished the other son for nothing. Whichever way you looked at it, if he was really the king's son, wasn't it enough that he had been exchanged? Why should he be banished too? And if he was not the king's true son, he did not deserve to have been banished – for what had he done wrong?

The king was thinking about this and regretting his sin and the great wrong he had committed. But he had no idea what he could do about it. It was a subject he could not discuss or seek advice about from anyone. He became very worried and anxious and told his ministers to turn back as he had some issues on his mind and saw no purpose in strolling around any more. They went home, and once the king was back in his palace much business awaited him. He became preoccupied with his affairs and forgot about the matter.

Meanwhile the banished son who was the king's true son continued as before and wasted his money. Once he went out alone for a stroll. He lay down to rest and began thinking about what had happened to him.

“What has God done to me?” he wondered. “If I really am the king's son, it is certainly not fair to me. And if I am not the king's son I also don't deserve to be a fugitive and an exile.”

Then he thought: “On the other hand, if it is true that God could really do such a thing and exchange the king's son and make him endure all this, is what I have done right? Was it proper for me to have behaved the way I have?”

He began to feel very sorry and regretted the bad things he had done. Afterwards he returned home and went back to his drinking. But having started to feel regret, he was constantly disturbed by thoughts of regret and repentance.

Once he lay down to rest. He dreamed that in a certain place there was to be a fair on a certain date. He was to go there and accept the very first paid work he was offered, even if it was beneath his dignity.

When he woke up, the dream was engraved in his mind. Sometimes dreams pass straight out of the mind, but this dream and its message were strongly fixed in his mind. Even so, it was very hard for him to carry it out, and he turned to drink even more. He had the same dream again several times, and it greatly disturbed him.

Once they were saying to him in the dream: “If you want to have pity on yourself: do it !” and he was forced to fulfill the dream. He went and gave his remaining money to his landlord, leaving his fine clothing behind in his lodgings. All he took for himself was a simple merchant's robe, and he made his way to the place of the fair.

Early next morning he went to the fair, where he met a merchant who said to him, “Do you want a job?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“I need someone to drive animals,” said the merchant. “Do you want me to hire you ?”

He needed no time to think about it because of the dream. He answered immediately: “Yes.”

The merchant hired him at once and immediately started giving him work to do, ordering him about the way a master orders his servants.

He began wondering what he had done. Menial work like this certainly did not befit him. He was a gentle person but now he would have to drive animals and be forced to go on foot side by side with the animals. But it was too late for regrets. The merchant was ordering him about like a master.

“How am I supposed to go on my own with the animals?” he asked the merchant.

“I also have other cattle drivers for my animals,” he replied. “Go with them.”

The merchant gave him some animals to drive, and he took them outside the city. Gathered there were the other cattle drivers who were going to take the animals, and they went together. He drove his animals while the merchant rode at the side on a horse.

The merchant rode his horse cruelly and showed extra cruelty to him. He was extremely afraid of the merchant, seeing the great cruelty he displayed towards him. He was afraid he would give him one blow with his stick and kill him instantly as he was so gentle and tender. He went along with the animals and the merchant at their side. They came to a certain place and took the sack containing the bread for the drivers. The merchant gave them to eat, and he was also given some of this bread.

Afterwards they passed a very thick forest where the trees were very close together. As they went, two of the animals entrusted to the king's true son, who had become the merchant's driver, strayed. The merchant shouted at him and he chased after them to try to catch them, but they ran away even further and he went chasing after them. The forest was so thick that as soon as he went in he could not see his companions and they could not see him.

He chased after the animals, which ran further away. He chased them until he came into the thick depths of the forest.

“Either way I will die,” he thought. “If I go back without the animals I will die at the hands of the merchant.” So great was his fear of the merchant that he was convinced he would kill him if he came back without the animals. “But if I stay here, I will also get killed by the wild animals in the forest. Why should I go back to the merchant? How can I go back to him without the animals?” He was very frightened of him.

He carried on chasing the animals, but they kept running further away. In the meantime night fell. Never before had it happened to him that he would have to spend the night alone deep in such a thick forest. He heard the cries and moans of the wild animals. He decided to climb up a tree and spend the night there. All he could hear were the cries and roars of the wild animals.

In the morning he looked down and saw his animals standing nearby. He climbed down from the tree and went to catch them but they ran off. The further he chased them, the further they fled, until they found some grass and stood grazing. He tried to catch them but they fled. Every time he went after them, they ran away until he came into the thickest depths of the forest. Here there were animals that have no fear of men at all, being so remote from human civilization.

Once again night fell. He heard the cries and roars of the animals and became very afraid. He noticed a very great tree standing there, and saw that a man was lying there. He was afraid, but it was some consolation that he had found a man there.

Each asked the other: “Who are you?”

“A man – who are you?”

“A man.”

The man lying by the tree asked him, “How did you come to be here?”

He did not want to tell him what had happened, so he simply said, “Because of the animals… I was driving animals, and two animals strayed in here, and that's why I came here.”

He asked the man he found by the tree, “How did you come to be here?”

“I came here because of my horse… I was riding on the horse and I stopped to rest and the horse went off and strayed into the forest. I was chasing after it trying to catch it, and the horse ran further away until I came here.”

They decided to join up and keep together, and agreed that even when they returned to civilization they would remain together. They spent the night there and heard the terrible howling, moaning and roaring of the animals.

Towards morning he heard loud laughter ringing through the whole forest. The sound of the laughter was spreading through the entire forest. The laughter was so loud that the tree was shaking and swaying with the sound. He was very shocked and frightened, but the man he had found by the tree said, “This no longer frightens me at all as I've already slept here the last few nights. This laughter is heard every night just before dawn, until all the trees tremble and shake.

Nevertheless, the king's true son was very shaken. He said to his friend: “Evidently this is the place of the demons, because no such laughter is ever heard in settled areas. Who has ever heard the sound of such laughter over the entire area?”

Day broke soon afterwards . They looked down and saw this one's animals and the other one's horse standing there. They climbed down from the tree and started chasing after their respective animals. The cattle ran further and further away, and he chased after them, while the other pursued his horse, which ran away until the two men were far apart and lost their way.

Meanwhile he found a sack of bread. This was priceless there in the wilds. He took the sack on his shoulder and went after his cattle.

Suddenly he encountered a man. At first he was worried, but at least it was some comfort that he had found a man there.

“How did you get here?” asked the man.

“And how did you get here?” he asked.

“Me? My fathers and fathers' fathers grew up here. But what about you ? How did you come to be here? For no human beings from civilized areas ever come here.”

He found this answer very disturbing because he understood that this was not a human being at all since he had told him that his fathers' fathers had grown up there and that nobody from inhabited areas ever came there. Nevertheless he did not harm him in any way but treated him in a friendly way.

The man of the forest said to the king's true son, “What are you doing here?”

He replied that he was chasing after the animals.

“Stop chasing after your sins,” he said, “These are not animals at all. It is only your sins that are leading you on this way. Enough! You have already had what you deserve – you have already received your punishment. Stop chasing after them. Come with me and you will attain what befits you.”

He accompanied him but was afraid to talk to him or ask any questions, because someone like this might open up his mouth and swallow him.

Meanwhile he found his friend who had gone chasing after his horse. The moment he saw him, he made signs as if to say, “Know that this is not a human being at all. Have nothing at all to do with him, because this is not a human being at all!” He then went over and whispered in his ear that this was not a human being.

The man with the horse looked and saw the sack of bread on his shoulder, and he started begging him.

“My brother, I haven't eaten for days – give me bread!”

“Here in the wilderness nothing will help you,” replied the king's true son, “My life comes first and I need the bread for myself.”

The man with the horse started begging and pleading with him. “I'll give you whatever I have…”

But in the wilderness bread is worth more than any gift or bribe.

“What will you give me?” replied the man with the cattle, who was the king's true son. “What can you give me in exchange for bread in the wilderness?”

“I will give you my very self!” said the man with the horse. “I will sell myself to you for bread.”

The man with the cattle considered the matter. “To buy a man, it's worth giving him some bread.” He bought him as his eternal slave. The man with the horse swore a solemn oath to him that he would be his servant for ever, even when they returned to civilization. In exchange he would give him bread. They would eat from the sack together until the bread was finished.

They went together after the man of the forest. Having been bought as his slave, the man with the horse followed the man with the cattle as they went after the man of the forest. As a result things became a little easier for the king's true son, because if he had to lift anything or needed something done for him he would order his slave to do it.

They went together after the man of the forest until they came to a place full of snakes and scorpions. He was very afraid. Out of fear he asked the man of the forest, “How will we get across here?”

“Do you think that is so hard?” asked the man of the forest. “How are you going to enter my house?”

He showed them his house, which was standing in the air. “How will you get inside my house?”

They went with the man of the forest, who carried them safely across and brought them inside his house. He gave them to eat and drink, and left.

The true son of the king – the one with the cattle – was now making use of his slave for all his needs. The slave was very unhappy over having sold himself as a slave because of the short time he was in need of bread. Now they had food. Because of one brief period , would he have to remain a slave forever?

He sighed and groaned. “How have I come so low as to be a slave?”

The true son of the king, who was now his master, asked him: “What was your earlier greatness that you now sigh over having come to such a level?”

The other man began to tell him that he had been a king, but people spread rumors that he had been exchanged… For this man with the horse was none other than the king of whom we spoke earlier, who was really the son of the maid. He told him how he had banished the other son, but later it entered his mind that he had not done right and he began to regret it. He was constantly beset by regrets over his evil crime against his friend.

Once he dreamed that his remedy would be to throw off the kingship and go wherever his eyes would take him. This was how his sin would be rectified. However he did not want to do such a thing. Yet he was constantly disturbed by these dreams telling him to do it. He threw off the kingship and went away, until eventually he came here. And now he would have to be a slave!”

The king's true son listened to all this in silence. “I'll think it over,” he said to himself. “I'll see how to deal with him.”

That night the man of the forest came and gave them to eat and drink and they spent the night there. Towards morning they heard the same sound of terribly loud laughter that made all the trees quake and tremble. The slave persuaded his master, the king's true son, to ask the man of the forest what this was.

“What is this sound of great laughter just before morning?”

“This laughter,” replied the man of the forest, “is when the day laughs at the night. Because the night asks the day, ‘Why do I not have a name when you arrive?' Then the day laughs very loudly , and day breaks – and that is the sound of this laughter.”

He found this very amazing – for it really is an amazing idea that the day laughs at the night.

In the morning the man of the forest left again, while they remained there eating and drinking. That night he came back, and they ate and drank and lay down to sleep. During the night they heard the cries of the animals, all roaring and moaning in strange voices. All the animals and birds were crying. The lion roared, the lioness growled in a different voice, the birds chirped and chattered… All of them sang and cried in different voices.

At first the two men were very shaken by all this. They were so afraid that they paid no attention to the actual sounds. Later they listened carefully, and heard that it was a most amazing, awesome song. Hearing this song was the ultimate delight, making all other delights in the world pale into insignificance . They agreed that they should stay here since they would have food and drink and could enjoy this most amazing delight.

The slave persuaded his master, the king's true son, to ask the man of the forest what it was, and he did so.

“This,” replied the man of the forest, “is because the sun made a garment for the moon. All the animals of the forest said that the moon greatly benefits them since their main time of dominion is at night. Sometimes they need to enter inhabited areas, but they are unable to do so during the day. Since their main time of dominion is at night, the moon does them a great favor by shining to them. They therefore agreed to create a new melody in honor of the moon, and this is the melody you hear.”

Now they listened to the melody even more carefully and they could hear that it was a most wonderful and profoundly pleasing melody.

“Do you consider this to be such a novelty?” asked the man of the forest. “I possess an instrument which I received from my fathers, which they inherited from their fathers' fathers. This instrument is made of special leaves and colors, and as soon as you place it on any animal, beast or bird, it immediately starts to sing this melody.”

Afterwards the same laughter rang through the forest, and day broke . The man of the forest left, and the king's true son went in search of this instrument. He searched the whole room but did not find it, and he was afraid to go any further.

The king's true son, the master, and his slave, the maid's true son, were afraid to ask the man of the forest to take them to civilization. But afterwards he told them he would take them back to civilization. He brought them to a human habitation and took the instrument and gave it to the king's true son.

“I am giving you this instrument as a gift,” said the man of the forest. “As for this one,” he continued, indicating his slave, the maid's true son who had become king because of the exchange: “…as for him, you will know how to deal with him.”

“Where should we go?” asked the king's true son.

He told them to look for a country called “The Foolish Country with the Wise King”. They asked him in which direction they should go to start asking how to find this country. The man of the forest pointed with his finger and said to the king's true son: “Go to that country. There you will attain your greatness.”

They left and went on their way. They had a strong desire to find some animal on which to test the instrument to see if it would make it sing. As yet they had not seen any kind of animal, but later they approached a settlement and found an animal. They placed the instrument on the animal, which began singing the same melody.

They continued their journey until they reached the Foolish Country with the Wise King. The country had a wall around it and the only way to enter was through one gate. They had to go around for many miles before they came to the gate to enter the country.

When they arrived, they were not allowed to enter. The king of the country had died and his son had become king. The old king had left a will saying, “Until now they called this ‘The Foolish Country with the Wise King'. But now they should call it the opposite: ‘The Wise Land with a Foolish King'. Whoever succeeds in changing the name back to the ‘ Foolish Land with the Wise King' should be the king.”

Only someone who would undertake to achieve this was allowed to enter the country. That was why they did not want to admit him. They said to him, “Are you able to undertake this task and restore the country to its original name?”

It seemed quite impossible for anyone to undertake such a task, and they could not enter. The slave tried to persuade his master to return home, but he was unwilling to go back as the man of the forest had told him he should go to this country and there he would achieve greatness.

In the meantime another man arrived on horseback, but he was refused entry for the same reason. The king's true son noticed the man's horse standing there, and took the instrument and placed it on the horse, which started singing the most amazing melody. The owner of the horse pleaded with him to sell him the instrument, but he was unwilling to do so.

“What could you give me in exchange for such an amazing instrument?” he asked.

“What will you be able to do with this instrument?” asked the owner of the horse. “The most you will be able to do will be to play it in some musical performance and earn a little money. I know something far superior to your instrument: I possess knowledge that I received from my fathers' fathers through which it is possible to understand one thing from another. For example, if someone makes a casual remark, this tradition enables one to deduce something else from his remark. Until now I have never revealed this knowledge to anyone in the world. But if you will give me this instrument, I will teach you this tradition.”

The king's true son realized that it would indeed be truly wonderful to be able to understand one thing from another. He gave the instrument to the owner of the horse, who taught him how to understand one thing from another.

Now that the king's true son knew how to understand one thing from another, he went to the gate into the country. He deduced that it must be possible to restore the country to its original name, because he already had the power to understand one thing from another. He understood that it was possible to do it even though he did not yet know how.

He decided to tell them to let him enter and he would undertake the task of restoring the country to its original name. What did he have to lose? He told the men who were barring entry to all except one who would undertake this task that they should let him in.

They admitted him and informed the ministers that there was a man who wanted to undertake to restore the country to its original name. They brought him to the ministers of state, who said:

“You must understand that we too are far from being foolish, heaven forbid. However, the old king was such an outstanding sage that compared to him, we are considered foolish. That is why the country used to be called the Foolish Country with the Wise King. Afterwards the king died and his son became king. He too is wise, but compared to us he is not wise at all. Therefore the country is now called the opposite: ‘The Wise Country with the Foolish King'.

“The old king left a will stating that if someone can be found who is so wise that he can restore the kingdom to its original name, he should be made king. The old king instructed his son to give up the kingship in favor of such a man. Whoever is so outstandingly wise that everyone else is foolish compared to him will be the king. For he will be able to restore the kingdom to its original name, ‘The Foolish Kingdom with the Wise King,' as they will all be foolish compared to him. You should therefore understand the mission on which you are embarking.” The ministers of state told the king's true son all this.

“The test to see if you are sufficiently wise,” they continued, “is as follows. The old king left an amazing garden. All kinds of instruments made of different metals grow there. Some are of silver and some of gold. The garden is most awesome and amazing, but it is impossible to enter it. As soon as anyone goes inside, he immediately starts being chased. They chase him and he screams, but he has no idea what is going on and does not see who is chasing him. This way they pursue him until they drive him out of the garden and force him to flee. Let us see if you are sufficiently wise to be able to enter this garden.”

“Do they beat the person who enters?” he asked.

“The main thing , ” they replied, “is that they chase him. He has no idea at all who or what is chasing him, and he flees in terrible panic.” This was what people who had entered the garden had told them.

The king's true son approached the garden and saw that it had a wall around it. However, the gate was open and there were no guards, since obviously such a garden did not need to be guarded. As he looked around he saw a statue of a man standing beside the garden. Above the statue was a tablet stating that this man had been king hundreds of years earlier and that peace had reigned in his time. Prior to this king there had been wars, as there were after him, but in the days of this king there was peace.

He pondered the matter. Having acquired the ability to understand one thing from another, he understood that everything depended on this man. On entering the garden, as soon as one began to be pursued, there was no need to flee at all. One had only to stand by the side of this man to be saved. Moreover, if they were to take this man and stand him inside this garden, everyone would then be able to enter peaceably into the garden. The king's true son could understand all this because of his ability to deduce one thing from another .

He entered the garden, and as soon as they began chasing him, he immediately went to stand by this man who stood outside next to the garden. This way he was able to leave in peace without being harmed at all. Other people who had entered the garden had fled in terrible panic as soon as they were chased. They were hurt and injured because of their very panic. But by going to stand by this man he left in peace and tranquility. The ministers watched, amazed that he had left safely .

The king's true son then gave instructions to take this man and place him inside the garden. They did so, and then all the ministers were able to enter the garden and leave safely without coming to any harm.

“Even so,” said the ministers, “despite the fact that we have seen you perform such a feat, it would not be proper to make you king because of only one feat. We will give you one more test.

“There is a throne that came from the old king. The throne is very high. By its side stand all kinds of animals and birds carved out of wood. In front of the throne stands a bed. By the bed stands a table, and on the table stands a lamp. Extending from the throne in all directions are well-trodden, walled pathways. But no-one has the least understanding of the connection between the throne and these pathways.

“After a certain distance along these pathways, by the side of one of them stands a golden lion. If any man approaches that lion, it opens its mouth and devours him. The path then continues beyond where this lion stands. After a certain distance along the second pathway that extends from the throne in a different direction, there stands another kind of beast – a leopard made of a different metal, which it is also impossible to approach. Afterwards the path extends further. The same applies to all the other paths. They spread through the entire country, but nobody understands the purpose of the throne or the objects standing by it or these paths. Your test will be if you can understand the purpose of this throne.”

They showed him the throne and he saw that it was very high indeed. He went up to the throne and examined it. He realized that this throne was made of the same wood as the instrument which the man of the forest had given him. He noticed that a certain rose was missing from the top of the throne. If the throne had this rose, it would have the same power as the instrument that had the power to play when placed on any animal, beast or bird.

He carried on looking, and saw that the rose missing from the top of the throne was lying on the ground . It would be necessary to lift it up and place it on top so that the throne would have the power of the instrument. For the previous king had devised everything with the utmost wisdom so that no-one would be able to understand it until the arrival of an outstanding sage who was able to change everything around and realign it properly.

He understood that it would be necessary to move the bed a little from its present position, and so too the table and the lamp. Likewise the birds and animals needed to be moved around. A bird would have to be taken from one place and moved to another, and the same applied to the other birds . For the king had made everything with the utmost wisdom and subtlety so that no-one would understand it, until a sage came who could deduce how to order everything properly. The lion standing by the pathway extending from the throne had to be moved elsewhere, as did all the other animals.

The king's true son gave instructions to arrange everything properly – to take the rose from below and fix it up above, and to arrange everything else in the proper order. Then they all began singing the most amazing song and all the different things performed their proper function.

The king's true son became king. Then he said to the maid's true son: “Now I understand that I am the king's true son and you are the maid's true son.”

From THE PRAYER LEADER

Once there was a prayer leader who was constantly engaged in prayer, songs and praise to God. He lived far from any inhabited area, but he would regularly visit the towns and villages. He would enter the home of somebody – usually a poor person or someone of little status – and talk to him heart to heart about the purpose of this world. For the truth is that there is no other purpose in life than to devote ourselves to serving God every day and to spend our time in prayer, songs and praises to God.

The prayer leader would speak to the person very inspiringly for a long time, until his words enter ed his ears and the person agree d to join him. As soon as he was willing, the prayer leader would take him to his chosen place far away from the city. It had a flowing river and trees and fruits. They lived off the fruit. As for clothing, the prayer leader didn't mind what they wore.

He would regularly go into the city to persuade people to serve God and follow his path of prayer. He would take whoever was willing to follow him to his place outside the city, and there they engaged in nothing but prayer, songs and praises to God, confessions, fasting, self-discipline and repentance. He would give them books he had on these subjects.

They continued following these practices until some of the people he had brought there were also fit to draw others to serve God. Eventually he would give one or two permission to go into the city to bring people closer to God.

The prayer leader was constantly busy drawing people closer and taking them from the city. He began to make an impact and the matter became public knowledge. Suddenly people started noticing that someone or other had gone missing from the city and no-one knew where they were. Somebody's son or the like would go missing and no-one knew where they were. Until it became known that a prayer leader was going around persuading people to devote themselves to serving God.

However, it was impossible to recognize or catch him, because this prayer leader acted very cleverly. He used to change the way he looked, and he would appear to each person differently. To one he looked like a poor man, to another like a merchant, and to someone else he would appear in a different guise.

Sometimes, when speaking with people, he saw that he could not succeed in his purpose . He would intentionally mislead them so they would not understand his real goal. The truth was that his only intention was to bring people to God. But if he saw he was accomplishing nothing with someone, he would steer the conversation in a different direction, making it impossible for the person to understand his real intention.

The Prayer Leader was making an impact and people were on the lookout for him, but it was impossible to catch him. He and his men lived far away from any human habitation, engaged in nothing but prayer, songs and praises to God, confessions, self-discipline and repentance.

This Prayer Leader had the ability to provide each one with what he needed. If he saw that one of his men thought he needed to serve God wearing golden clothes, he would provide him with them. Conversely he would sometimes attract a wealthy person and take him away from civilization, and he understood that this rich man needed to go about in cheap, torn clothing. He would lead each one according to what he knew he needed.

In the eyes of the people he brought to God, a fast or a great penance was more precious than all the pleasures in the world. They had more pleasure from fasting and repentance than all the pleasures in the world…
The Country of Wealth

Now there was a certain very wealthy country where all the people were rich. However, they had the strangest customs. For them, everything depended on wealth. Each person's status depended on how much money he had. Someone who possessed a given sum of so many thousands or tens of thousands had a certain rank, while a person who possessed a different amount had a different rank. Their entire class system depended on how much money each person possessed. The one who possessed a specified sum of so many thousands and tens of thousands was king.

They all had flags corresponding to how much money they had. Someone who possessed a given sum had one flag and the corresponding social rank as indicated by that flag. A person with a different sum had a different flag and status, depending on the value of his property. They had laid down how much wealth a person had to possess in order to have a given flag and rank. Each person's rank depended on how much money he had in accordance with their rules.

They had instituted that a person having only a limited sum would be a mere human, whereas if he possessed less he was an animal or a bird. They had different kinds of beasts and birds. Someone possessing no more than a given sum would be labeled a human lion while others were considered as different species of animals or birds, because anyone who had very little property was considered a mere animal or bird. For them the main thing was how much money a person possessed, and his rank and status depended on that alone.

They also agreed that they wanted to have planets and stars. Whoever possessed a specified sum would be a planet, because, having so much money, he was thought to possess the same power as that planet. There is a planet that causes gold to grow: where gold-dust is found on earth, the reason is because that planet makes the earth produce gold. Therefore gold ultimately derives from the planets and stars. If a person had so much gold, they thought that he must have the power of that planet and must therefore be a planet.

They also decided to have constellations. Somebody who possessed a specified sum would be a constellation. They also appointed those possessing enormous wealth as angels, until eventually they all agreed that they should also have gods. Whoever possessed a specified sum of so many multi-millions was to be a god. Since God had blessed him with so much wealth, he himself must be a god.

They also came to the conclusion that , in order not to become defiled, they should not live in the air of this world or mix with other people . . Everyone else in the world was impure in their eyes. They therefore decided to seek out the highest mountains in the world and live there, so as to be above the air of this world. They sent out men in search of the highest mountains, and when they found some very high mountains, all the people of the country migrated there.

Different groups of them lived on each mountain. They built huge fortified walls around each mountain and dug deep moats in order to make it impossible for anyone to get there. Each mountain had only one secret path so that no stranger could ever reach them. They posted guards at a distance from each mountain so that no stranger could even get near. They lived there on these mountains practicing their customs, and they had numerous gods depending on how much money each possessed.

Since the main thing for them was money and great wealth made a person a god, they were very worried about murder and robbery, because people could kill and steal in order to become gods. Nevertheless, they said that since anyone who possessed very great wealth was a god, he would have a protective power against robbery and murder.

They instituted services and sacrifices. They used to make offerings and pray to their gods. They also sacrificed humans. People would sacrifice themselves to their god in order to become incorporated in him so as to then be reincarnated as a person of wealth. For their main religion was money. They held services and offered sacrifices and incense to their gods – the owners of great wealth.

Even so, the country was plagued with murder and robbery, because those who did not believe in the services resorted to killing and stealing in order to gain wealth. This was because the most important thing in life for them was money, since money buys every kind of food and clothing, and man needs money for his livelihood. This was why money was the foundation of their belief and religion.

They made every effort to ensure that they should never be lacking in money at all, since money was their god. They considered it essential to try to increase their wealth by import ing wealth from elsewhere. Traders went out from there to other countries in order to earn profits and bring more wealth back into their country.

They certainly strictly prohibited the giving of charity, since charity diminishes the wealth with which God blesses a person, whereas the main thing for them was to possess wealth. Since charity cuts into a person's wealth, they strictly prohibited giving charity.

They also had officers whose task was to check each person to see if he had as much money as he claimed. Everyone had constantly to display his wealth in order to maintain the rank he had been awarded on the basis of his wealth.

Sometimes an animal might become a man or a man an animal. If a person lost his money he turned from being a man into a penniless animal. Conversely, when a person made a profit, he turned from an animal into a man. The same applied to all the other ranks as determined by their wealth.

They had pictures and portraits of their gods – the owners of enormous wealth. They all surrounded themselves with these pictures and used to kiss and embrace them since this was their religion and belief...

Some of the Prayer Leader's virtuous followers had visited this country of wealth, and on their return they told the Prayer Leader how deeply enmeshed the people of that country were in the lust for wealth… The Prayer Leader had great pity on them and decided to go there in person to try to persuade them to give up this error…
The Hand

The Prayer Leader related:

The king I was with possessed a hand – a picture of a hand with five fingers and all the lines found on a hand. This hand was a map of all the worlds and everything that has ever or will ever exist, from the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth until the very end and afterwards – everything was pictured on this hand.

The lines of the hand formed pictures of how each of the different worlds exists in all its details, similar to the way they would be marked on a map. The lines of the hand formed letters, just as there are letters on a map by the side of each different thing to indicate what it is – a certain city or a river or the like. Similarly, the lines of the hand formed letters by each thing to explain what it is.

All the details of all the different countries, towns, rivers, bridges, mountains and so on were marked on the hand with these lines. By the side of each one were letters indicating what it was. All the people in each country and everything that happened to them were all marked there. Also written there were all the paths leading from country to country and from place to place….

Also marked on the hand was the path leading from world to world. There is a path by which one can go from earth up to heaven. The only reason why people cannot go up to heaven is that they do not know the way. But the hand showed the way to go up to heaven, and it marked all the paths from world to world. Elijah went up to heaven by one path, which was inscribed on the hand, while Moses our Teacher went up to heaven by a different path, which was also inscribed there. Enoch went up to heaven by yet another path, and that too was inscribed there. So it was from world to world: everything was marked in the lines of the hand.

Also marked on the hand was how each individual thing existed at the time of the creation of the world, how it is now and how it will be afterwards. Thus Sodom was marked there as it was when it was inhabited prior to its destruction. The destruction of Sodom was also pictured, and so was Sodom as it is after its destruction. The hand was marked with everything that ever was, is or will be….


PARABLES:
THE CLAY-DIGGER
KEEPING HAPPY PAYS
Once there was a poor man who used to make his living by digging clay and selling it.

One day he was digging in the mud when suddenly he found a jewel. It must have been worth a fortune! The Clay-digger had no idea how much it was worth, so he went to a jeweler to have it valued.

The jeweler told him it was worth so much that there was no-one in their country with enough money to buy it! He would have to travel to London , the capital city. But being poor, the man did not have the money to make the journey. He went and sold everything he had and went from house to house asking for contributions, until he had sufficient money to journey to the port.

He wanted to board the ship but he did not have enough money for the fare. He went to the captain and showed him the precious stone. The captain immediately took him onto the ship with great flourish, saying, “You're a sure bet!” The captain gave him a special first class cabin with every luxury as if he was a person of very high rank.

The Clay-digger's cabin had a window overlooking the sea. He would sit there enjoying himself immensely rejoicing over the diamond, especially at mealtimes, because joy and good spirits are medically proven aids to easy digestion!

One day he sat down to eat and placed the diamond on the table in front of him so that he could enjoy it. After his meal, he took a nap. While he was asleep, the cabin-boy came in and took the tablecloth with all the crumbs, and without even noticing the diamond, shook everything into the sea!

When the Clay-digger awoke he realized what had happened. He almost went out of his mind with worry and anguish. What was he to do? The captain was a pirate who would murder him for the boat fare.

Still, the Clay-digger pretended to be happy – as if he was quite unaware that anything had happened.

Every day during the voyage the captain used to talk to him for several hours. He did the same today. The Clay-digger made such a show of being happy that the captain didn't notice anything unusual.

The captain said to him, “I know you are clever and honest. I want to buy a large quantity of grain to sell in London – I can make a big profit. My fear is that I will be accused of embezzling from the royal treasury. Let the purchase be made in your name and I will reward you handsomely.” The Clay-digger felt it was a good idea and he agreed.

As soon as they arrived in London , the captain died and everything was left in the hands of the Clay-digger! The cargo was in fact worth many times more than the diamond!

The truth is that the diamond did not belong to the Clay-digger – and the proof is that he lost it. The grain did belong to him – and the proof is that he kept it. And he only gained what was his because he forced himself to keep happy.

KAPTZIN PASHA

Once there was a Jew at the court of the Sultan of Turkey whom the Sultan loved and esteemed more highly than all his ministers of state. Every day he used to call him to his palace to spend time with him alone. The ministers of state were very jealous of the Jew, and tried to think up ways to discredit him in the eyes of the Sultan and ruin him completely.

Among the ministers was a certain Pasha known as Kaptzin Pasha. He hated the Jew much more than all the other ministers, but he tried to make him think he really loved him. Every day he tried to devise ways to achieve his true desire – to discredit him in the eyes of the Sultan.

One day Kaptzin Pasha approached the Jew and slyly began telling him how he had been with the Sultan…

“And I heard him say with his own mouth how much he loves you. But one thing bothers him. When you speak with him, he cannot stand the bad odor wafting out of your mouth. Of course he can't do without you, so this smell causes him great suffering.”

Kaptzin Pasha continued: “Therefore my advice is that every time you come before the Sultan, you should hold a scented handkerchief in front of your mouth. This way the Sultan will not smell the bad odor coming from your mouth , and you won't fall foul of the Sultan.”

In his innocence the Jew believed what the Pasha had said and decided to follow his advice.

Next the Pasha went to the Sultan and told him that he had heard the Jew talking about his terrible suffering. “…Because every time he speaks with the Sultan, he finds a bad smell emanating from the Sultan's mouth.”

“The Jew has therefore decided,” continued the Pasha, “that when he comes to speak with you, my lord the Sultan, he will hold a scented handkerchief in front of his mouth so as not to smell the bad odor from the Sultan's mouth. The sign that what I am saying is true will be that tomorrow, when he comes to speak with you, you will see with your own eyes that he will be holding a handkerchief over his mouth.”

On hearing this, the Sultan became extremely angry and said to the Pasha, “If I see that you are right, I will utterly destroy him.”

Sure enough, the following day the Jew came to the Sultan holding a handkerchief over his mouth, just as the Pasha had advised him, since he believed what he had been told . Seeing this, the Sultan took it as proof that the Pasha had told him the truth. The Sultan immediately wrote a letter to his Chief Executioner saying: “The person who brings you this letter must be thrown at once into the furnace where they cast those condemned to death by burning.”

The Sultan closed and sealed the letter and said to the Jew, “I would like you to deliver this letter personally to the Chief Executioner in such-and-such a place.”

The Jew took the letter and promised the Sultan he would carry out his instructions. He had no idea what was written in the letter and he went home.

Now this Jew meticulously observed the mitzvah of circumcising Jewish boys. Whenever he was invited to perform a circumcision he would not allow any obstacle to stand in his way, because this mitzvah was very precious in his eyes.

God wanted to save His faithful friend and so He arranged that on the very day that the Jew was supposed to deliver the Sultan ' s letter to the Chief Executioner, a man came from a certain village to invite the Jewish minister back to the village in order to circumcise his son. Since the Jew never under any circumstances missed an opportunity to perform this mitzvah, he started thinking: “How can I carry out the Sultan's instructions to deliver his letter?”

God arranged that at just that moment the Pasha came towards him. The Jew told the Pasha that he had come from the Sultan, who had given him a letter to deliver to the officer in question. However, today God had sent him the opportunity to perform the mitzvah of circumcision.

“And my custom is never under any circumstances to pass up this mitzvah,” said the Jew. “Therefore I would like to ask you to take the letter and deliver it.”

The Pasha was delighted, because now he would be able to make further accusations against the Jew for not having carried out the Sultan ' s wishes with respect to the letter. The Pasha took the letter from his hand and delivered it into the hands of the executioner, who immediately seized the Pasha and threw him into the fiery furnace. He was burned up just as he deserved in accordance with the divine law of “measure for measure”.

The Jew knew nothing at all about what had happened to the Pasha. The following day he went again to the Sultan, who was very surprised to see him.

“Have you not yet delivered the letter I gave you for that officer?” he asked.

“My lord the Sultan,” replied the Jew, “I entrusted the letter to Kaptzin Pasha to deliver to the officer, because God sent me an opportunity to perform the mitzvah of circumcision, and it is my custom never to pass up this mitzvah.”

The Sultan realized it was no mere chance that the Pasha, who had tried to discredit the Jew, had been burned to death. The Sultan immediately asked the Jew, “Why do you hold a scented handkerchief over your mouth when you speak to me?”

“The Pasha advised me to do this,” said the Jew, “because he told me that he heard you say you cannot stand the odor from my mouth.”

The Sultan then told the Jew how the Pasha had tried to discredit him. “He said that you cannot stand the odor coming from my mouth!”

The Sultan told the Jew what was written in the letter he had given him, and said to him:“Now I know that God rules on earth and saves His dear ones from all evil. What the Pasha plotted to do to you was done to him, and God repaid his evil to his face.”

From that time on the Jew was more esteemed than ever in the eyes of the Sultan – more than all his other ministers – and he gave him the greatest respect and honor.



THE BITTER HERB

Once a Jew and a German banded together to go around begging. The Jew taught the German how to pretend to be a Jew (since German and Yiddish are quite similar). This way the Jews, who are kind by nature, would help him.

Pesach was coming, so the Jew taught the German how to behave when invited to someone's home for the Pesach Seder. He explained to him that first they would make the Kiddush and then wash their hands… The one thing that the Jew forgot to mention was the eating of the bitter herbs.

When the German came to the Seder he was ravenous, not having eaten for the whole day. He was gleefully anticipating eating all the good things the Jew had told him about. But at first, all they gave him was a tiny piece of vegetable dipped in saltwater for Karpas, and they carried on reading the Haggadah.

The German was desperately longing for the meal. He was delighted when they started eating the Matzah. But all of a sudden they gave him the Maror, which was terribly bitter in his mouth.

The German thought this was the entire meal, and all they were going to eat was the Maror. He immediately ran out, bitter and hungry, thinking to himself that the Jews were truly cursed. “After all that ceremony, this is what they give to eat?!?” He returned to the synagogue and went to sleep.

Later on the Jew arrived, his face beaming, fully satisfied from eating and drinking. “How was your Seder?” he asked. The German angrily told him what happened.

“Oh you stupid German,” said the Jew. “If you had only waited just a little longer you would have enjoyed the best meal, exactly like me.”

So it is in serving God. After all a person's efforts and exertions to draw closer to God, he is subjected to a little bitterness – because the purification of the body comes through bitterness. The person thinks there will never be anything except bitterness, and immediately runs away.

If he would just be willing to wait a while and endure this little bitterness in order to purify the body, he would later experience every kind of vitality and delight. In serving God, first one experiences the bitterness of the purification of the body, but afterwards one enjoys the vitality.



THE TREASURE

A man from a certain town once dreamed that in Vienna , under a bridge, there lay buried treasure. He travel ed to Vienna and stood there by the bridge trying to think what to do. During the day it would be impossible to dig because of the people.

As he stood there, a soldier passed by and asked, “What are you standing thinking about?” The man thought it would be best to tell him the truth. Perhaps he would help him and they could share the proceeds. He told him the whole story.

“Jews only think about dreams!” cried the soldier. “I also had a dream, and in my dream I too saw a treasure. It was in a particular house belonging to a particular person.”

The soldier mentioned the very name of the man's city and the name of the man himself. “There in the cellar lies a great treasure, and I want to go there and take it.”

The man returned home, dug in his cellar and found the treasure.

“Now I know that the treasure is with me!” he said. “Except that to find out about it, I had to travel to Vienna .”

So it is in serving God. The treasure is inside each person. But to find out about the treasure, one must travel to the Tzaddik.



THE TURKEY-PRINCE

Once the king's son went mad. He thought he was a turkey. He felt compelled to sit under the table without any clothes on, pulling at bits of bread and bones like a turkey. None of the doctors could do anything to help him or cure him, and they gave up in despair. The king was very sad...

Until a Wise Man came and said “I can cure him.”

What did the Wise Man do? He took off all his clothes, and sat down naked under the table next to the king's son, and also pulled at crumbs and bones.

The Prince asked him, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“And what are you doing here?” replied the Wise Man.

“I am a turkey,” said the Prince.

“Well I'm also a turkey,” said the Wise Man.

The two of them sat there together like this for some time, until they were used to one another.

Then the Wise Man gave a sign, and they threw them shirts. The Wise Man-Turkey said to the king's son, “Do you think a turkey can't wear a shirt? You can wear a shirt and still be a turkey.” The two of them put on shirts.

After a while he gave another sign, and they threw them some trousers. Again the Wise Man said, “Do you think if you wear trousers you can't be a turkey?” They put on the trousers.

One by one they put on the rest of their clothes in the same way.

Afterwards, the Wise Man gave a sign and they put down human food from the table. The Wise Man said to the Prince, “Do you think that if you eat good food you can't be a turkey any more? You can eat this food and still be a turkey.” They ate.

Then he said to him, “Do you think a turkey has to sit under the table? You can be a turkey and sit up at the table.”

This was how the Wise Man dealt with the Prince, until in the end he cured him completely.



THE TAINTED GRAIN

A king once told his prime minister, who was also his good friend: “I see in the stars that everyone who eats from this year's grain harvest is going to go mad. What do you think we should do?”

The prime minister suggested they should put aside a stock of good grain so they would not have to eat from the tainted grain.

“But it will be impossible to set aside enough good grain for everyone,” the king objected. “And if we put away a stock for just the two of us, we will be the only ones who will be sane. Everyone else will be mad, and they will look at us and think that we are the mad ones.

“No. We too will have to eat from this year's grain. But we will both put a sign on our heads. I will look at your forehead, and you will look at mine. And when we see the sign, at least we will remember that we are mad.”



THE CHANDELIER

There was once a boy who left his father to spend time in other lands. After a long time away, he eventually came home to his father. He boasted that while he had been away, he had learned a great art: how to make a chandelier.

He told his father to assemble all the expert chandelier-makers so that he could demonstrate his proficiency in this art. The father did so, gathering all the master chandelier-makers to witness his son's greatness and see what he had accomplished all this time that he had been away in other lands.

The son brought out a chandelier that he had made, but they all thought it very poor. His father approached them all asking them to tell him the truth, and they were forced to admit that it was very poor.

The son was still boasting: “Have you seen the wisdom of my art?” His father told him that not everyone saw it as being so beautiful.

“On the contrary!” replied the son. “This is precisely how I have demonstrated my greatness, because I have shown them all that they lack. This chandelier contains the deficiencies of each and every one of the master craftsmen assembled here. Don't you see? One of them considers this part of my chandelier to be very poor but he finds a different part very beautiful. Another craftsman finds the exact opposite. The very part that his friend considers poor, he sees as being exceptionally beautiful, while he considers a different part to be poor. So it is with all of them. What is bad in the eyes of one is beautiful in the eyes of another, and vice versa.

“I made this chandelier entirely out of their deficiencies – to show them all that they all lack perfection and that each one has some deficiency. For what is beautiful in the eyes of one is a deficiency in the eyes of his friend. But if I want, I can make a perfect lamp.”

If people knew all of a thing's shortcomings and deficiencies, they could understand the nature of that thing even if they had never even seen it.

“Great are God's works!” No one person is like any other. All forms were included in Adam: the very word Adam includes all the different human forms. Similarly, the word “light” includes all the different light-sources that exist. The same applies to all the different things in creation. Even among the highest of the high, not one is like any other…

This world contains wisdom that people could live off without even having to eat or drink…




THE HORSE AND THE PUMP

There was once a man who did not believe in what people say about joker-demons from the side of evil who sometimes trick people, as is known to have happened on various occasions.

One night a joker-demon came to him and invited him to step outside. The man went outside and the joker showed him a fine horse that he wanted to sell. The man examined the horse and saw that it was indeed a very fine horse.

“How much do you want?” he asked.

“Four rubles,” replied the joker.

The man saw that it was easily worth eight rubles, because it was a particularly good horse. He purchased the horse from the joker for four rubles and was satisfied that he had found a great bargain.

The following day he took out the horse to sell. Some people were interested and offered him a certain sum of money. But he said to himself, “Presumably if they are offering me such a sum, it must be worth double” – and he did not accept.

The man led the horse on further and some people offered him twice the previous offer, just as he had wanted. But he said to himself: “Presumably it is worth at least double this price.”

He led the horse further along until its price reached thousands. But the man would not agree to sell it to anyone. No matter how much anyone offered, he said, “Presumably it is worth at least double.”

Eventually there was no-one who could afford the horse except the king. The man took it to the king, who was willing to pay an enormous sum for it. Everyone said it was an excellent offer, but the man refused to accept it , saying to himself: “Presumably it is worth more.” Thus the king too did not buy the horse.

The man left the king and went to water the horse. There was a pump that people could use to get water for their animals. All of a sudden the horse jumped into the pump and disappeared without a trace – or so it appeared, because the whole episode with the horse was a trick by joker demons.

The man' s screams and shouts drew a crowd around him.

“Why are you shouting ?” they asked.

He replied that his horse had jumped into the pump. They gave him a sound beating, because he seemed insane. The hole of the pump was very narrow. How could a horse jump into it?

He saw how they were beating him, thinking he was crazy. He wanted to run away, but as he tried to escape, the horse suddenly stuck its head out of the pump. Once again the man started screaming , “Aaaagh! Aaaagh!” – because he was convinced it was his horse.

Again a crowd gathered around him and started beating him a second time because he seemed crazy. Again he wanted to flee, but as soon as he tried to escape, there was the horse sticking its head out of the pump. He started screaming again and the people gathered around again and beat him…

Evil tricks people time and time again with absolutely nothing – complete falsehood that contains no real substance at all. The person is tempted to follow evil, each time thinking he will satisfy his desires and gain more. Time after time he chases after these lies.

Until suddenly they disappear and all his desires vanish , as happens at times. For a time the desires subside. But then, when the person wants to distance himself from them completely, they return and stick out their head, making him pursue them again. This keeps on happening: as soon as they stick out their head, he continues pursuing them… Understand this well.




MIRROR IMAGE

A certain king built himself a palace and summoned two men to decorate it for him. The king divided the palace into two parts, putting one man in charge of one half and the second in charge of the other. The king set a time limit within which they had to complete their work.

The two men went off. One of them struggled hard to teach himself the art of painting and plastering as best as he possibly could, and he did so well that he was able to paint his part of the palace with very beautiful and highly unusual murals of animals and birds and the like. Everything was executed with wondrous beauty.

However, the second man paid no attention to the king's command and did nothing whatever about it. As the date for the completion of the work approached, the first man had already finished his side in all its beauty and wonder. The second man then began to look at himself and ask what he had done! He had wasted his time on futility and nothingness without giving a thought to the king's instructions.

He tried to think what to do. He realized that in the few days left before the time expired, it would be impossible even to teach himself to paint let alone actually paint his part of the palace. The closing date was almost upon them. But he had an idea. He plastered his entire portion with a kind of shiny pitch. He plastered this dark pitch over his entire section, and the pitch was like a mirror: it reflected everything, just like a mirror. He then hung a curtain in front of his section to act as a partition between it and that of the other man.

When the appointed time came, the king went to inspect the work the men had done in the allotted time. He examined the first side with its amazingly beautiful paintings executed with exceptional skill. However, the other side was covered with a curtain, behind which everything was dark: nothing whatsoever was visible.

Then the second man stood up and drew aside the curtain. The sun was shining, and because of the pitch, which reflected everything like a mirror, all those remarkable paintings were visible on his side too. All the painted birds and other wondrous forms painted in the first man's side could be seen in the second man's side as well.

Everything the king had seen in the first man's section he also saw in this man's section. Not only that, but even all the precious objects and furnishings which the king had brought into the palace were all visible in the second man's side as well. This found favor in the eyes of the king.



THE FIXER
A STORY ABOUT TRUST

There was a certain king who thought to himself: “Who in the world has fewer worries than me? I have everything good: I am the king and the ruler…”

He decided to investigate if this was true. He went out at night and stood behind each house to hear what people were talking about. All he heard was each person's worries. One had problems in his shop. At a different house he heard someone talking about a problem that needed government assistance. Each and every one had his own worries.

One night the king saw a very low house. It was like a cellar built half underground with windows at ground level. The roof was broken and sagging. There the king saw a man sitting playing his fiddle. The king had to listen very carefully just to hear the music. The man was very happy. He had a jug of wine and various foods in front of him, and he was very happy. He was full of joy, with no worries whatever.

The king (who was in disguise) went into the house and asked the man how he was doing. The man invited the stranger to sit down, and the king saw the jug of wine and the various foods, and how the man was simply full of joy. He served his guest a drink and drank a toast to the king. Out of affection for this man, the king also drank. Afterwards he lay down to sleep, and he could see that the man was completely happy with no worries at all.

In the morning the king rose and so did the man. He accompanied the king out of the house.

“From where do you get all this?” asked the king.

“I know how to repair things,” replied the man. “I can repair anything that is broken. I am not able to make anything from scratch, but if something gets broken I can repair it. Each morning I go out and repair a few things. Then, when I've earned five or six shillings, I purchase all this food and drink for myself.

When the king heard this, he said to himself: “I'm going to spoil it for him.”

The king went back to the palace, took off his disguise and issued a decree forbidding anyone who had something in need of repair from giving it to somebody else to repair. Either he would have to repair it himself or buy a new one.

That morning the man went out looking for people with things in need of repair, but they told him the king had decreed that it was forbidden to give anything to someone else to repair. The man was very upset about this, but he had trust in God.

As he was walking, he noticed a householder chopping wood.

“Why do you have to chop the wood?” he asked. “Is that fitting for someone of your status?”

“I tried to find someone to chop wood for me,” replied the householder, “but I couldn't find anyone, so I was forced to chop it myself.”

“Give it to me,” said the man, “and I will chop it for you.”

He chopped the wood, and the householder paid him a shilling. The man saw that this was a good way to earn money and he went to chop more wood, until he had earned six shillings. He again bought his entire meal – and it really was a meal – and he was very happy.

That night the king again peered in through the window of the man's house and saw him sitting there with his food and drink before him in a very happy mood. The king went into the house and , as on the previous night, he slept there. In the morning the man arose and accompanied the king out.

“From where do you get this?” asked the king. “To buy this you need money!”

“I used to repair anything that was broken , ” replied the man. “But the king passed a decree prohibiting giving anything out to someone else for repair. So I chopped wood until I earned enough money for this.”

The king left him and issued a decree that nobody must give their wood to anyone else to chop.

When the man approached someone offering to chop his wood, the person told him that the king had issued a decree not to give anybody wood to chop. The man was very upset about this because he had no money. But he had trust in God. As he was walking, he noticed someone cleaning out a stable.

“Is it fitting for you to have to clean out this stable?” he asked.

“I looked for someone to clean it out but I couldn't find anyone, so I have to do it myself.”

“Let me,” said the man, “I will clean it!”

He set to work and cleaned out the whole stable, and the owner gave him two shillings. He went and cleaned more stables until he had earned six shillings. Again he bought a whole feast and went home. The meal was a meal , and he was very happy.

Again the king came to look, and once again saw that everything was as it had been before. The king went inside and stayed the night. In the morning the man accompanied the king out. The king asked him how he had managed, and he explained.

The king issued a decree making it forbidd en to employ anyone else to clean out one's stable. That morning the man went in search of stables to clean, but people told him that the king had passed a decree forbidding this.

The man went to the king's recruiting officer to sign up as a soldier in the army. Some soldiers are forcibly conscripted for army service, but others are hired soldiers who serve for pay.

The man went to the recruiting officer to sign up for pay. However, he made a condition with the recruiting officer that he was not signing up permanently but only for a while, and that he was to receive his pay each morning for that day's work. The officer immediately dressed him in army uniform, hung a sword at his side and sent him where he was needed.

Towards evening, after he had completed all his duties, he threw off his uniform and went to buy his whole meal – and the meal was a meal! He went home and he was very happy. Again the king went to look and saw that everything was ready in front of him and that he was very happy. The king went into the man's house and lay down. In the morning he asked him how he had managed, and the man told him what he had done.

The king summoned the recruiting officer. He instructed him not to dare pay wages to anyone that day. That morning, when the man went to the recruiting officer to collect his day's pay, the officer refused to give it to him.

“But I made it a condition with you to pay me every day,” the man protested.

“The king has decreed not to pay anyone today,” replied the recruiting officer. All the man's pleas were of no avail .

“I will be happy to pay you tomorrow for two days,” said the officer, “but today it is impossible to pay.”

What did the man do? He broke off the blade of his sword from its handle, replacing it with a piece of wood. When the sword was in its sheath this was not in the least visible from the outside. The man pawned the blade of the sword. With the money he received he bought the whole meal – and the meal was a meal!

The king arrived and saw that the man was completely happy, as before. Again the king entered his house and lay down. He asked him how he had managed, and the man told him the whole story – how he had been forced to break the blade of the sword from the handle, and how he had pawned it in order to buy what he needed for the meal.

“And afterwards, when I receive the pay for that day, I will redeem the blade and repair the sword. Nobody will be able to see a thing because I can repair anything that is broken, so there will be no loss to the king.

The king went to his palace and called the recruiting officer. He told him that a certain person had been condemned to death. He instructed the officer to call the particular soldier he had hired and to order him – and only him – to cut off the condemned man's head.

The officer summoned the man, who came before the king (now dressed in his royal clothes). The king gave instructions for all his ministers to assemble in order to witness this comic spectacle exposing a man who had stuck a piece of wood in his sword in place of the blade. The man came before the king and fell at his feet.

“My lord the king, why have I been summoned?” he asked.

“In order to cut off this condemned criminal's head,” replied the king.

The man pleaded that he had never in his life shed blood. He begged the king to call someone else for this.

The king answered that he and nobody else was obliged to kill the man.

“Is the verdict so clear-cut?” asked the man. “Perhaps it is not so clear that he deserves to die. I have never shed blood in my life. How could I shed blood when it is not clear that the prisoner deserves to die?”

The king replied that there was no shadow of a doubt that the prisoner deserved to die. “And you and nobody else must execute him.”

The man saw that he could not prevail over the king, so he turned to God and said:

“Eternal God: Never in my life have I shed blood. If this man is not guilty, let the blade of my sword turn into wood!”

He took hold of the sword and drew it from the sheath, and everybody saw that it was made of wood. Everybody laughed heartily, and the king saw that he was an excellent man and sent him off in peace.

Chayey Moharan (manuscript)



THE SAD TZADDIK

It is very bad to be sad all the time, and one should do everything possible to avoid it. Try to inject enthusiasm into your life. Encourage yourself by remembering that every single movement and gesture you make toward s serving God is very precious in His eyes, even if you advance no more than a hairsbreadth. In this world, the World of Action, man dwells in a body. This makes every single forward movement extremely difficult, and that is why each one is so precious in God's eyes.

It is told that a certain Tzaddik was overcome with a terrible sense of sadness and heaviness. It is very hard indeed when sadness and heaviness take hold of a Tzaddik, because they attack him ever more strongly.

Eventually this Tzaddik fell into such a mood of deep discouragement and heaviness that he found it literally impossible even to move . He wanted to encourage himself and pull himself up, but nothing could make him happy or inspired. No matter what he tried to be happy about, the Evil One found some reason to make him depressed about it. Eventually he could find nothing to be happy about, because whenever he tried to be happy about something , he found in it something to make him depressed.

Finally he started trying to make himself happy by dwelling on the fact that “He did not make me a heathen.” This is certainly a reason to feel immeasurable joy, because the vast gulf between the holiness of even the simplest Jew and the impurity of the heathens is beyond all measure.

When a person thinks of God's kindness to him because “He did not make me a heathen,” he should feel ever-increasing joy – a joy that is not mixed with any sadness.

When someone tries to make himself happy over a personal achievement of some kind, he can always find a reason to be unhappy. No matter what he may have achieved, he will always find shortcomings and deficiencies which stop him from pulling himself up and feeling perfectly happy.

However, not to have been created a heathen is a gift of God alone. God Himself did it – He had mercy on the person and did not make him a heathen. How could anything be lacking in this joy since it is exclusively the work of God? Regardless of what kind of Jew the person may be, there is certainly an immeasurable difference between himself and the heathens.

The sad Tzaddik started making himself feel happy about this. He started rejoicing and raising himself little by little. With each passing moment he felt ever greater joy… until he reached such a level of joy that he attained the joy Moses experienced when he ascended to receive the Torah.

As the Tzaddik raised himself and rejoiced, he flew thousands and thousands of miles through the upper worlds. Suddenly, he took a look at himself and saw that he was far, far away from the place where he had been at first. He felt great anguish over the thought that he might fall somewhere and the local people would be very surprised that he had suddenly disappeared.

A Tzaddik always wants to walk modestly, and his happiness began to subside, because happiness has its limits. It starts and then it comes to an end. When his happiness began to subside, it subsided little by little, and he descended little by little.

As he descended from the place where he had flown in his ecstasy, he did not return to his original place by the path he took when ascending . Rather, he dropped straight down from where he was. He was therefore very surprised to discover that he had returned to his original place.

Understand this well: When he looked at himself, he saw that he was actually in the very place in which he had been at first. He had not moved from there at all, except perhaps by a slight hairsbreadth – for no human can measure anything so exactly. God alone knows.

The Tzaddik found it amazing that he had flown so far through so many different worlds, yet here below he had not moved from his place at all. This was a lesson to him that even the tiniest movement one makes to edge forward and advance slightly in this world, even if less than a hairsbreadth, is so precious in God's eyes that even millions of miles and millions of worlds cannot compare with it.

This may be understood when we view this material world as the center point of the planetary spheres. All the more so in relation to the higher spiritual worlds, the entire earth is certainly considered as no more than a tiny point.

From this point you can draw as many lines as you wish in any direction. Where the lines start extending out of the point, they are all very close to one another. But the further they extend from the point, the further apart they become. When the lines are very far away from the point, the lines are also very far apart from one another despite the fact that, close to the point itself, they are very near to each other.

Imagine lines stretching from this lower world only so far as the planetary spheres. Even if a person moves no more than a single hairsbreadth from the place where he was in this world, on the level of the planetary spheres there is an enormous distance – millions of miles – between the place that was above his head at first and the place above his head now. The distance is in proportion to the size of the highest sphere as compared with this world down below. For the highest sphere contains stars without number, and every star is the size of this world or more.

How much more so when one imagines these lines extending even further, beyond the spheres of the planets and stars to the higher spiritual worlds, compared with which all the spheres of the planets and stars are considered nothing.

Even the tiniest movement of less than a hairsbreadth that a person makes here in this world thus causes an immeasurably greater movement in the higher spiritual worlds. Even though in this lowly world the person may feel he has hardly moved at all, because it is impossible to measure the distance he moved and only God knows, nevertheless in the higher spheres he has moved through thousands and thousands of worlds and miles. How much greater, then, is the distance one moves in the higher worlds when he advances a whole mile or more in the service of God in this world.

Doctor David Hawkins from TLC

“The self needs to learn respect for the Self and the Silence of the Presence.”
TLC, ‘Reason’.
Doctor David Hawkins

Who is the one you feed?

The Two Wolves.

One evening an elder told his youngster about a battle that goes on inside people:

He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

"One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

"The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."

The youngster thought about it for a minute and then asked the elder: "Which wolf wins?"

The elder simply replied, "The one you feed."

Montaigne and Bacon on death:

My partner DR and I were last night talking about death. DR espoused the same view of Montaigne, the stoicism of which is evident in Montaigne's words about death here:

If you don't know how to die, don't worry. Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She'll do the job perfectly for you. Don't bother your head about it.

We trouble our life by concern about death, and death by concern about life. One torments us, the other frightens us. It is not against death that we prepare outselves - that is too momentary a thing. A quarter hour of suffering, without consequences, without harm, does not deserve any particular precepts. To tell the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations of death.

And here is Francis Bacon on Death:

It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other. He that dies in an earnest pursuit, is like one that is wounded in hot blood; who, for the time, scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind fixed, and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the dolors of death.

Both men minimise death's power. One man says, in effect, that nature does death for you. The other man says that if any emotion or thought can take the mind of death, as it clearly does every day, then how much more so a purposeful focus on "an earnest pursuit" makes death seem a meagre thing.

What do you want to experience now?

From www.stevepavlina.com/blog

What do you want to experience now?

Instead of asking questions like, “What should I do?” or “What’s the right decision?” consider asking, “What do I want to experience now?”

Consider the difference between these pairs of questions:
• Should I quit my job? -> Would I like to experience another job?
• Should I start my own business? -> Would I like to have the experience of running a business?
• Should I stay with my current relationship partner? -> Would I like to continue experiencing this relationship?
• Should I exercise? -> Would I like to experience a different level of physical activity?
• Should I earn more money? -> Would I like to experience greater financial abundance?

What kind of experience are you having right now?  Are you having experiences that are aligned with your desires?  If not, what would you like to experience instead?  What else would you like to experience in your lifetime?  What decisions must you make right now for those experiences to manifest?

Don’t fall into the trap of attachment to outcomes.  Your life is what you are experiencing right now; it isn’t a mere chain of one-time outcomes.  When you focus on attracting desirable experiences, the outcomes will take care of themselves, since outcomes are a part of experience anyway.

Old Chinese Poem

Many classic Chinese poems speak eloquently of the suffering caused by warfare. The author of this one is unknown, but it is considered a classic.

At fifteen I went with the army,
At fourscore I came home.
On the way I met a man from the village,
I asked him who there was at home.
That over there is your house,
All covered over with trees and bushes.
Rabbits had run in at the dog-hole,
Pheasants flew down from the beams of the roof.
In the courtyard was growing some wild grain;
And by the well, some wild mallows.
I'll boil the grain and make porridge,
I'll pluck the mallows and make soup.
Soup and porridge are both cooked,
But there is no one to eat them with.
I went out and looked towards the east,
While tears fell and wetted my clothes.

Translated by Arthur Waley (1919)

Adler

Expediency is one thing and moral justification is another.

Mortimer Adler

A quote from Muhammad Iqbal

...Self negates itself
In the Community, that it may be
No more a petal, but a rosary.
- Muhammad Iqbal.

from The Mysteries of Selflessness.

All our prayers and practices
Will not lead one step to God
Unless the heart go first...

Like the mustard seed grows
So from little things come big.

Compassion, faith, and prayer
Plant forests of the heart.

On Balance

Balanced, calibrated 305.

bal·anced adj
1. taking account of all sides on their merits without prejudice or favoritism
2. containing different elements in suitable quantities or suitably arranged to produce a satisfying and effective whole
3. in a state of mental and emotional stability and able to make rational judgments

fair, impartial, unbiased, unprejudiced, even-handed, distinterested, objective, reasonable, neutral.

balanced, adjective.
1. stable.
Ex. Quiet temperament is the mark of a balanced person.
2. harmonious; orderly.
Ex. a balanced composition.

Not extreme
Balanced diet
Proportional

Where am I unbalanced in my life?

Here is how Gil Fronsdal puts spiritual choices:

What choices can I make that lead towards reliable, wise peace and happiness? What is skilful to allow us to have some lasting, ongoing peace and wellbeing?

Gil’s vision of the Buddha’s example:

Sitting down under a tree in a very simple place and then begin to look at one’s heart and mind and ask:

“What choices can I make to make my heart simpler?”
“What choices can I make to make my heart more open?”
“What choices can I make to make my heart more peaceful?”
“What choices can I make to make my heart more happy?”
“What is that?”

That seems to me to point to the essence of balance. Being balanced is a experience of constancy from within that comes with the experience of self-trust and self-care, and being balanced is a state of refering inward for happiness and peace.

'There Is Nothing new To Get...'

There is nothing new to get.
You have on the other hand,
to get rid of your ignorance,
which makes you think you are other than Bliss.

For whom is this ignorance?
It is to the ego.
Trace the source of the ego.
Then the ego is lost and Bliss remains over.

It is eternal You are That, here and now...
This is the master key for solving all doubts.
The doubts arise in the mind.
The mind is born of the ego.

The ego rises from the Self.
Search the source of the ego
and the Self is revealed.
That alone remains.

The universe is only expanded Self.
It is not different from the Self...

- Ramana Maharshi

From Sat Darshan

From Sat Darshan


As in a well of water deep,

Dive deep with Reason cleaving sharp.

With speech, mind and breath restrained,

Exploring thus, may you discover

The real source of ego-self.

The mind through calm in deep plunge enquiries.

That alone is the real quest for the Self.


- Ramana Maharshi

'Bliss is not something to be got...'

...Bliss is not something to be got.
On the other hand you are always Bliss.
This desire [for Bliss] is born of the sense of incompleteness.
To whom is this sense of incompleteness?
Enquire. In deep sleep you were blissful.
Now you are not so.
What has interposed between that Bliss and this non-bliss?
It is the ego.
Seek its source and find you are Bliss.



- Ramana Maharshi

On Socrates' death

I read the story of the last hours of Socrates' life.

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/phaedo.html


One cannot help be deeply impressed by the somber, measured, and stately words. The scene could not be more dramatic, with the terrible grief of his friends barely held in check whilst Socrates himself is cheerful and serene.

Why would Socrates ask the servant of all people if he thought it was a good idea to offer a libation with the poisin he was about to drink? The servant defers to Socrates' judgment; was his request a courtesy, or was it something else?

The sense of physicality of the final words is palpable. One hears no more words of comfort, only the sounds of Socrates' footsteps as he walks around waiting for the poisin to numb his legs. It is all absolutely real; one is as present there is if alive in that moment.

I choose to take his last words on their face value. He feels himself having been lifted of a great burden, an illness, a heaviness whose weight we can only suppose, as he dies. And so he asks Crito to sacrifice a cock to the god of health, as thanks for what is about to unfold. The gesture is not symbolic, but simply the concrete, direct experience of Socrates in his last moment, shared freely with his friends.

A peaceful death, certainly, but in the wordly context he left behind all this complexity and conflict. Socrates voluntarily sees his death as an opportunity for growth and transformation instead of decay and decrepitude. The death itself vanishes in significance; the life becomes an emblem of cheerful serenity that can inspire later generations. All of which is why these last moments are a wonderful gift to future generations.

Free rendering of Dharmapada Chapter Two - Vigilance

I now attend to the unchanging and undying.

I now attend with intense wakefulness to being alive.

I now attend to the conditions supporting wakefulness, and wakefulness brings me great happiness.

I now seek freedom and happiness with great perseverence through meditation.

I now stimulate wakefulness, remember the truth, act with kindness, and do the right things the right way so that I shine with intense wakefulness.

I am an island of calm, attentive, awake clarity, and I am still in the storms of life.

I am wealthy in attention and clarity. I let go of pride and distraction and just let things be.

I now find great joy and bliss in meditation, and I bless sensual pleasure with love and let go.

In my heart I grow gradually more still and attentive. I see a tower of wisdom and ascend the terraces one by one to great happiness and joy. I bless with love the crowd below.

I now pay pure attention among the inattentive. I am now as energetic as a racehorse among nags.

My clarity and wakefulness are a fire that warms my world and burns through my illusions.

Now great joy and happiness in meditation fills me with powerful concentration and compassion.

Confucius on social politics

I read a Chinese philosopher, (maybe Master Kung Tse, maybe a modern Chinese novelist, I’m not sure) saying that when a wise man meets someone he wants to understand, he asks about the person’s work, family, and ethnic loyalties.

This is the cat equivalent of staring straight at another cat, looking down and blinking, then staring again for the exact same length of time. This is the dog equivalent of smelling one anothers genitals with wagging tails. This is the frog equivalent of – well, the frog social millieu is perhaps the subject of another blog entry and for another time.

Asking about a stranger’s work, family and ethnic loyalties is the social skill that comes just after being able to say hello. Political correctness be damned: I like to do it a lot. It is traditional, fresh, universal and commonplace all at once.

Success with people for me arises from friendliness and awareness of our common wealth, which in turn implies the willingness to put away childish things, things that intervene and obscure clear and friendly talk.

Two disciplines of Kung were chatting about his politics. One had noticed that whenever Kung arrives in a new country he is always well informed about the politics. How does he manage to learn so much about a new country, he asked his friend.

The answer is fascinating:

“The master learns about the politics of a country by being cordial, kind, courteous, temperate and deferential. The master has a way of learning which is quite different from other peoples, isn’t it?” (Rendered from Simon Ley’s translation of Analects, 1.10.)

Kung was a man who had certainly put away childish things. In his courteous friendliness and plain awareness of things as they are, he seems to me to have been a wiser statesman than perhaps any politician we have in the world today.

Guru Stories

Once a guru walked out to sea on the water with a disciple holding his hand. When, far out at sea at night and standing on water, the guru let go of the poor man’s hand, the man promptly screamed and sunk and began to drown, so he reached in and drew the man back up to the surface. On reaching land much later he immediately fell into “a black sleep” said the storyteller.

But the guru was not finished with him. He stared at him like a Siamese until he awoke, and on the moment he opened his eyes the guru said “That walk was the manifestation of the Adi-Shakti (original power).” The poor guy screamed with shock at the realization and promptly fell unconscious. Sacre blue!

Another time the British authorities came to visit this guru to ask him where he got the money to build his ashrams, hospitals, roads, villages, and farms. The guru had simply walked into the forest and began building with the money on hand, so he had nothing to show the visitors.

So he led them deep into a black swamp, filled with alligators as far as the eye could see. And he began to produce huge wads of pristine notes. “Whenever I need money,” he told the men, “I simply wrestle that big she-alligator over there and when she is submissive I take money fresh out of her mouth.” And he produced piles of fresh money from nowhere.

The visitors backed away, praying for the guru’s mercy and did not bother him again.

Another time…
The guru used to close and open his palm, face downwards, and money would fall from it into the waiting hands of his workers in exactly the denominations needed. This happened every day with every workers, and they all knew and trusted him to do this.

Anyway, one day the authorities arrested the guru in the morning and put him in a holding cell on the way to prison. As the day drew on the guru decided to get out and pay his workers so he called for a chamber pot to piss into which they brought.

He pissed until the pot was full then kept pissing into the fry pan, the shit bucket, the laundry baskets and the potted plants. He did not stop pissing until his captors set him free, and then he walked back to his workers to pay them on time, out of this air as usual.

Another time he was in prison and he decided to go for a walk. So he went into turiya, meditative absorbsion, and bilocated to the rooftop where he enjoyed some nice exercise in front of his captor’s eyes, all the while meditating in his cell.

He wore no clothes until he was thirty, and then only a loincloth afterwards. When he taught he spread his legs wide open and exposed him often. When he got an erect penis it meant no more to him than an elbow or an apple in a dish.

When it came to food he would eat anything. He would eat shit or delicate crab meat. One day he went behind a female cow and cupped his hands behind her hole to catch her steaming fresh cowpats, then cheerfully ate the shit with his whole face.

Another stream of stories have to do with offerings to the guru and their consequences. One time a magician put a mantra said to cause death on a cigar and gave it to him. The guru smoked the cigar contentedly and two days later the man was dead. Another time a fisherman brought crab meat to the guru as offering, and that same day he and his co-worker were caught in a dreadful storm out at sea. Their boat capsized, and the deck hit their heads and knocked them both unconscious in the water.When they awoke they were stunned to discover that they lay in their boat amid piles of freshly caught fish, and they were in tow to a fast moving boat, at full sail, with the guru waving at them from the boat.

Suffice to say, all of these stories and more were witnessed by people still living among us today. Countless people blind from birth and many ill from all diseases now see and live among us well and happy by the guru’s grace. The guru would climb a tree and toss leaves by the armful down to visitors, and when they took the leaves home they would find healing from illness. So these stories are as numberless as the stars about this particular guru.

I do not have any opinion about them. I have no view of any kind about this guru or these stories. However, I did laugh and laugh when they were told, so I thought I would pass them on. Enjoy!

THE SECRETS OF HEALTH, WEALTH AND HAPPINESS

THE SECRET OF HEALTH:
Eat and Drink Right; Exercise.

THE SECRET OF WEALTH:
Spend less. Learn more, earn more, save more. Invest right.

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS:
Take responsibility for all choices; be willing to forgo perception of gain, desire and profit; be willing to be of selfless service to life in all its expressions including oneself.

Simplicity trumps theory; solitude trumps socialising and entertainment; practice trumps workshopping; persistence trumps indecision; intention and choice trumps cravings and useless wants - every time in all times and all places. All it takes is a clear intention to grow.

The inspiration for all these words, and none of the responsibility, goes to Dr David R. Hawkins, and to Divinity.

THE SECRETS OF PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL GROWTH

The source of growth is spirit. The manifestations of spirit are integrity, courage, love, peace, willingness, and acceptance. Any actions intentionally in concord with these manifestations results in growth.

The ego is the source of futile change. Animal in origin, this involves moving around a lot, that rapidly exhausts its source of sustenance and also tends to conceal the source of growth.

Growth occurs when body, emotions and mind change. Broadly speaking, growth in body tends toward health, growth in emotions tends toward wealth and growth in mind tends toward happiness.

Body, emotions and mind DO NOT grow when they are identified falsely as "me".

Body, emotions and mind DO grow when they are identified correctly as "mine".

Body, emotions, and mind are not "me", but "mine". Identifying them correctly as stewardships allows for responsibility and a clear view to emerge.

EXAMPLES:
The successful student grows because she is willing to change her mind to use new knowledge and skills; because she courageously accepts her emotional resistances to learning and learns in spite of them; because she maintains sufficient health to think and turn up to school.

The successful businesswoman grows because she is willing to focus her mind and discipline her time and master the details of her business with the best data; because she is able to love and inspire peace between the people she works with; because she shows integrity by keeping fit and being ethical.

The spiritual student grows because he is willing to face shortcomings in integrity and accept them courageously; because he meets emotions with love and peace; because he loves his existence and so cares for his body and surroundings appropriately.

The inspiration for all these words, and none of the responsibility, goes to Dr David R. Hawkins, and to Divinity.

THE SECRETS OF SUCCESS

THE SECRETS OF SUCCESS:

Don’t lie; love truth.

Be punctual. Obey.

Seek understanding instead of judgementalism.

Seek appreciation and gratitude for everything that occurs as an opportunity to learn and grow instead of cursing, criticising, and opinionating.

Seek to be at peace and satisfied every day by humbly overcoming resistance to inner growth instead of chasing after external garbage.

Pith Prayer

Lord, may I be willing to forgo
perceptions of gain, desire, and profit

And thereby be willing to be of selfless service
to life in all of its forms.

AMEN.