#maxmuller

[coldhotsaucekiss]

“A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.” -Max Muller • • • #flower #bloom #maxmuller #quotestoliveby #quotestagram #mygarden #2020 #love #lovealways #colorfulcolorado #poppies #lovealways #growth #instaflower #gardener #red #details #nature #blooming #jadore (at Denver, Colorado) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFely0KARiA/?igshid=1cf9udbirjb4o

[najmdesignsphotos]

"A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love." ~ #MaxMuller Featuring: @kathylarubia__ 👗: @fashionnova 📸: @najmdesignsphotos #port #portrait #portraitphotography #portraiture #portraitsnyc #nycmodel #latina #spring #nyc #manhattan #riversidepark #newyork #enchantedladiesmeetup #happiness #goodvibes #positivevibes #fashion #ootd #instagood #mood #femalephotographer #canon #najmdesignsphotos (at New York, New York)

[kittyfirekreations]

“A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.” – Max Muller 💗💫#kittyfirekreations #loveisintheair #youngliving #maxmuller

[indica153-blog]

#Love #MaxMuller

[feralcatpro]

Funny how life shows you little signs if you leave yourself open to see them..✨💖 Last time I saw this as I was about to walk out my door, I had the most perfect magical day! 🎉Here we go again...🌈🤗 "A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love." - #MaxMuller ☀️🍃🌺 #Pride ❤️💛💚💙💜#loveislove #HappyPride🦄 (at NYC Pride (The NYC LGBT Pride Organizer))

[impugningdmind]

Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings

A true devotee who has drunk deep of Divine Love is like a veritable drunkard, and, as such, cannot always observe the rules of propriety.

The Knowledge of God may be likened to a man, while the Love of God is like a woman. Knowledge has entry only up to the outer rooms of God, but no one can enter into the inner mysteries of God save a lover, for a woman has access even into the harem of the Almighty.

He who has faith has all, and he who wants faith wants all.

So long as one does not become simple like a child, one does not get Divine illumination, Forget all the worldly knowledge that thou hast acquired, and become as ignorant about it as a child, and then thou wilt get the knowledge of the True.

God is in all men, but all men are not in God : that is the reason why they suffer.

He is to be known as a Sanyasin, we read in the Bhagavad-gita. Who does not hate and does not love anything.

Avadhūta, literally one who has shaken off all attachments.

Sanyasins, men who have completely shaken off the fetters of passion, who have disciplined their body and subdued the imaginations of their mind to a perfectly marvellous extent, cannot be doubted. They are often called Yogins, as having exercised Yoga.

Within certain limits Yoga seems to be an excellent discipline and in one sense, we ought all to be Yogins. Yoga, as a technical term, means application, concentration, effort.

And if they have been brought up in a philosophical atmosphere, or are filled by deep religious feelings, they would very naturally become what the Mahatmans are described to be - men who can pour out their souls in perfervid eloquence and high-flown poetry, or who are able to enter even on subtle discussions of the great problems of philosophy and answer any questions addressed to them.

A chosen religion is always stronger than an inherited religion

Vedanta, the oldest religion and philosophy of the world. The end, the goal and the highest object of the Veda.

Paramahansa, high soaring eagle.

Debendranath Tagore, I have been moved by the Spirit of God, but I do not know of what use it will be. Now I have become quite useless to the world. I have now very little to connect me with the world," the Maharshi continued, "I am living the life of a recluse, I have no energy left. The energy and earnestness you see in me now is roused only by seeing you." I have got the essence of these things within me now, and I am enjoying the sweetness thereof. So there is now no more need for me to go to the texts.

At the age of sixteen, Rmakrishna, having been invested by his own father with the sacred Brahmanic thread, was taken to this school, but what was his disgust to find that after all their high talk on being and non-being, on Brahman and Maya, on how the soul is liberated by the realisation of Atman, they would never dream of practising these precepts in their own lives, but run after lust and gold, after name and fame. He told his brother plainly he would never care for that kind of learning, the sole aim of which was to gain a few pieces of silver, or a few maunds of rice and vegetables. He yearned to learn something which would raise him above all these, and give him as a recompense God Himself. From that time he kept aloof from the school.

Sincere as he always was, he could do nothing from mercenary motives, nor did he ever do anything which he did not thoroughly believe.

He used to say, 'That man who had been an emperor in his former birth, who had enjoyed the highest pleasures the world can give, and who had seen the vanities of them all, would attain to perfection in this life on earth.'

Mother! destroy in me all ideas that I am great, and that I am a Brahman, and that they are low and pariahs, for who are they but Thou in so many forms?

"My soul! this is what the world calls money,impressed with the queen's face. It has the power of bringing you rice and vegetables, of feeding the poor, of building houses, and doing all that the world calls great, but it can never help thee to realise the ever-existent knowledge and bliss, the Brahman. Regard it, therefore, as rubbish."

On receiving a costly gift, "It increases vanity, but it can never help to realise the ever-existent knowledge and bliss, and therefore is no better than a piece of torn rag.

The lady lived there for some years, and made her friend practice all the different sorts of Yoga which make a man complete master of his body and mind, render his passions subservient to his reason, and produce a thorough and deep concentration of thought, and, above all, the fearless and unbiased disposition which is essential to everybody who desires to know the truth and the whole truth. About this time Ramakrishna began to practice Yoga, or the physical discipline which makes the body strong and enduring. He began by regulating his breath, and went through the eight-fold methods prescribed by Patanjali.

What is high and what is low in the sight of a Gyani?

He could never understand, however, Ramakrishna's love for his mother (the goddess Kali). He would talk of it as mere superstition, and ridicule it, when Ramakrishna made him understand that in the Absolute there is no thou, nor I, nor God, nay, that it is beyond all speech or thought. As long, however, as there is the least grain of relativity left, the Absolute is within thought and speech and within the limits of the mind, which mind is subservient to the universal mind and consciousness; and this omniscient, universal consciousness was to him his mother and God.

The highest point of love is reached when the human soul can love his God as a wife loves her husband. The shepherdess of Braja had this sort of love towards the divine Krishna, and there was no thought of any carnal relationship. No man, they say, can understand this love of Sri Krishna until he is perfectly free from all carnal desires.

After all these visions and his realizations of different religions he came to the conclusion that all religions are true, though each of them takes account of one aspect only of the Akhanda Sakkhidananda, i.e. the undivided and eternal existence, knowledge, and bliss. Each of these different religions seemed to him a way to arrive at that One.

He had attained to great Yoga powers, but he never cared to display these marvellous powers to anybody. He told his disciples that all these powers would come to a man as he advanced, but he warned them never to take any heed of the opinions of men. They had not to please men, but to try to attain the highest perfection, that is, unity with Brahman. The power of working miracles was rather a hindrance in the way to perfection, inasmuch as it diverted the attention of man from, his highest goal.

When the rose is blown, and sheds its fragrance all around, the bees come of themselves. The bees seek the full-blown rose, and not the rose the bees.

Men possessed of wonderful Yoga powers and great learning came to learn from this illiterate Paramahansa of Dakshinesvara, and in their turn acknowledged him as their spiritual director (Guru), touched as they were by the wonderful purity, the childlike simplicity, the perfect unselfishness, and by the simple language in which he propounded the highest truths of religion and philosophy.

When pressed to take rest, he would say, I would suffer willingly all sorts of bodily pains, and death also, a hundred thousand times, if by so doing I could bring one single soul to freedom and salvation.

He was a wonderful mixture of God and man. In his ordinary state he would talk of himself as servant of all men and women. He looked upon them all as God. He himself would never be addressed as Guru, or teacher. Never would he claim for himself any high position. He would touch the ground reverently where his disciples had trodden. But every now and then strange fits of God consciousness came upon him. He then became changed into a different being altogether. He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything. He spoke as if he had the power of giving anything to anybody. He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramakrishna. He said that he was free from all eternity, and the practices and struggles after religion which he went through were only meant to show the people the way to salvation, He had done all for them alone. He would say he was a Nitya-mukta, or eternally free, and an incarnation of God Himself. 'The fruit of the pumpkin,' he said, comes out first, and then the flowers ; so it is with the Nitya-muktas or those who are free from all eternity, but come down for the good of others.'

The object of the poet is to warn people against voluptuousness, not as something in itself criminal, which has never been an Indian view, but as a hindrance in obtaining that serenity of mind without which the highest objects of life, dispassionateness, serenity, and clear-sightedness can never be obtained.

Man thinks that he is an Ego dwelling in the body, seeing and hearing, comprehending and reasoning, reasoning and acting, while with, the strict Vedantist the true self lies deep below the Ego, or the Aham which belongs to the world of illusion. As an Ego, man has become already an actor and enjoyer, instead of remaining a distant witness of the world. He is then carried along into the Sansara, the concourse of the world; he becomes the creature or the slave of his accumulated acts (karman), and goes on from change to change, till in the end he discovers the true Brahman which alone really exists, and which as being himself is called Atman or Self, and at the same time Paramatman, or the Highest, Atman and Brahman, both being one and the same thing.

Good works may be helpful in producing a proper state of mind for receiving this knowledge, but it is by knowledge alone that men can be saved and obtain Mukti, freedom, and not by good works. This salvation or freedom finds expression in the celebrated words Tat tvam asi, thou art that, i.e. thou art not thou, but that, i.e. the "only existing Brahman; the Atman, the Self, and the Brahman are one and the same."

Brahman is pure intelligence, and when the opponent remarks that intelligence is possible only if there are objects of intelligence, he replies: 'As the sun would shine even if there were no objects to illuminate, Brahman would be intelligence even if there were no objects on which to exercise his intelligence. Such an object, however, exists even before the creation, namely, Nama-rupa, the names and forms, as yet undeveloped, but striving for development (avyakrite, vyakikirshite), that is the words of the Veda living in the mind of the creator even before the creation.

One of the most ancient commands of Greek philosophy was the famous Know Thyself. Here the hindu philosopher would step at once and say that this is likewise the very highest object of their philosophy, only that they express it more fully by "Atmanam atmana pasya, See the Self by the Self!".

The Vedanta-philosophy has been called: a philosophy of negation, which tries to arrive at the truth by a repeated denial of what cannot be the truth. It often defines its own character by Na, na, Not this, not that.

What remains for the Atman? This Self, this the true Atman, was discovered in the lotus of the heart in true Self-consciousness, it was discovered as not-personal; though dwelling in the personal or living Atman, the Jiva, it remained for ever a mere looker-on, untouched by anything.

In the Khandogya upanishad III,14, we read: 'Surely this universe is Brahman. It should be worshiped in silence as the beginning, the being, and the end of all. Its matter is thought, life its body, light its form. Its will is truth, its Self the infinite (ether). It works all, it wills all, it scents all, it tastes all, embracing the Universe, silent and unconcerned. This is the Self in the innermost heart, smaller than a mustard seed or the kernel of it. This is the Self in the innermost heart, larger than the earth, larger than the atmosphere, larger than the sky, larger than all worlds. The all working, all-willing, all-scenting, all-tasting one, the all-embracing, silent, unconcerned one, this is the Self in the innermost heart, this is Brahman, this I shall become when parting from hence. He who has this, does not doubt.'

It is this self that brings bliss, finding peace and rest in the invisible, the immaterial, the inexpressible, the unfathomable. So long as anything else is left, hidden anywhere, there is no peace and no rest, however wise a man may think himself. Or, as Yagnavalkya says : 'He who knows this, knows everything.' 

Every name that can be imagined for expressing what is really inexpressible, is assigned in the Upanishads to Brahman. Brahman is neither long nor short, neither subtile nor gross; he is without parts, without activity, still, without spot, without fraud, he is unborn, never growing old, not fading nor dying, nor fearing anything; he is without and within. Whether such a being can be called he, is very doubtful, for he is neither he nor she; he is It in the very highest sense of that undifferentiated pronoun.

If the world is real the Self is not. If the Self is real the world is not.

Man is man phenomenally, the world is world phenomenally, the gods of the world are gods phenomenally, but in full reality all are the Godhead, call it Atman or Brahman, metamorphosed and hidden for a time by Avidya or Nescience, but always recoverable by Vidya or by the Vedanta-philosophy.

Samadhi may be looked at, however, from two points, as either purely physical or as psychical. From an ordinary Samadhi, a man may recover as one recovers from a fainting fit, but the true Samadhi consists in losing oneself or finding oneself entirely in the Supreme Spirit. From this Samadhi there is no return, because there is nothing left that can return. A few men only who have reached it, are enabled to return from it by means of a small remnant of their Ego, and through the efficacy of their wish to become the instructors and saviours of mankind.

Something very like Samadhi is the state of deep dreamless sleep, during which the soul is supposed to be with Brahman for a time, but able to return. This deep, unconscious sleep is one of the four states, waking, sleeping with dreams, sleeping without dreams, and dying.

[indiaheritagedesk]

[antonmeily]

"A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love." - M. Müller // Shot by @thedudacastro #MaxMuller