Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 172 of 217 · 20 per page

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  2. A letter of Berengar to Pope Gregory VII. from the year 1077, in which he addresses him as "pater optime," and assures him of his profound reverence and love (p. 182 and 230). He thanks him for a letter of protection he had written to his legate, Bishop Hugo of Die (afterwards Archbishop of Lyons), but begs him to excuse him for not attending a French council of his enemies, to which he had been summoned. He expresses the hope of a personal conference with the pope (opportunitatem vivendi praesentiam tuam et audiendi), and concludes with the request to continue his patronage. "Vel [i.e. Valeat] Christianitas tua, pater optime, longo parvitati meae tempore dignum sede apostolica patrocinium impensura." The result of this correspondence is unknown. Berengar’s hope of seeing and hearing the pope was fulfilled in 1078, when he was summoned to the Council in Rome; but the result, as we have seen, was his condemnation by the Council with the pope’s consent.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The tendency to mystic speculation was kept up and nourished chiefly through the writings which exhibit a fusion of Neo-Platonism and Christianity, and which go under the name of Dionysius Areopagita, the distinguished Athenian convert of St. Paul (Acts 17:34). He was, according to a tradition of the second century, the first bishop of Athens.771 In the ninth century, when the French became acquainted with his supposed writings, he was confounded with St. Denis, the first bishop of Paris and patron saint of France, who lived and died about two hundred years after the Areopagite.772 He thus became, by a glaring anachronism, the connecting link between Athens and Paris, between Greek philosophy and Christian theology, and acquired an almost apostolic authority. He furnishes one of the most remarkable examples of the posthumous influence of unknown authorship and of the power of the dead over the living. For centuries he was regarded as the prince of theologians. He represented to the Greek and Latin church the esoteric wisdom of the gospel, and the mysterious harmony between faith and reason and between the celestial and terrestrial hierarchy. Pseudo-Dionysius is a philosophical counterpart of Pseudo-Isidor: both are pious frauds in the interest of the catholic system, the one with regard to theology, the other with regard to church polity; both reflect the uncritical character of mediaeval Christianity; both derived from the belief in their antiquity a fictitious importance far beyond their intrinsic merits. Doubts were entertained of the genuineness of the Areopagitica by Laurentius Valla, Erasmus, and Cardinal Cajetan; but it was only in the seventeenth century that the illusion of the identity of Pseudo-Dionysius with the apostolic convert and the patron-saint of France was finally dispelled by the torch of historical criticism. Since that time his writings have lost their authority and attraction; but they will always occupy a prominent place among the curiosities of literature, and among the most remarkable systems of mystic philosophy. Authorship.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Berkeleyans unanimously assume that no retinal sensation can primitively be of volume; if it be of extension at all (which they are barely disposed to admit), it call be only of two-, not of three-, dimensional extension. At the beginning of the present chapter we denied this, and adduced facts to show that all objects of sensation are voluminous in three dimensions (cf. p. 136 if.). It is impossible to lie on one's back on a hill, to let tile empty abyss of blue one's whole visual field, and to sink deeper and deeper into the merely sensational mode of consciousness regarding it, without feeling: that an indeterminate, palpitating, circling depth is as indefeasibly one of its attributes as its breadth. We may artificially exaggerate this sensation of depth. Rise and look from the hill-top at the distant view; represent to yourself as vividly as possible the distance of the uttermost horizon; and then with inverted head look at the same. There will be a startling increase in the perspective, a most sensible recession of the maximum distance; and as you raise the head you can actually see the horizon-line again draw near.[217] Mind, I say nothing as yet about our estimate of the 'real' amount of this depth or distance. I only want to confirm its existence as a natural and inevitable optical consort of the two other optical dimensions. The field of view is always a volume-unit. Whatever be supposed to be its absolute and 'real' size, the relative sizes of its dimensions are functions of each other. Indeed, it happens perhaps most often that the breadth- and height-feeling take their absolute measure from the depth-feeling. If we plunge our head into a wash-basin, the felt nearness of the bottom makes us feel the lateral expanse to be small. If, on the contrary, we are on a mountain-top, the distance of the horizon carries with it in our judgment a proportionate height and length in the mountain-chains that bound it to our view. But as aforesaid, let us not consider the question of absolute size now,—it must later be taken up in a thorough way. Let us confine ourselves to the way in which the three dimensions which are seen, get their values fixed relatively to each other. Reid, in his Inquiry into tile Human Mind, has a section 'Of the Geometry of Visibles,' in which he assumes to trace what the perceptions would be of a race of 'Idomenians' reduced to the sole sense of sight. Agreeing with Berkeley that sight alone can give no knowledge of the third dimension, he humorously deduces various ingenious absurdities in their interpretations of the material appearances before their eyes.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  And these symptoms also result when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats, etc., etc. As far as these ingredients of the subtler emotions go, then, the latter form no exception to our account, but rather an additional illustration thereof. In all cases of intellectual or moral rapture we find that, unless there be coupled a bodily reverberation of some kind with the mere thought of the object and cognition of its quality; unless we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or witticism; unless we thrill at the case of justice, or tingle at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be called emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of how certain things are to be called— neat, right, witty, generous, and the like. Such a judicial state of mind as this is to be classed among awarenesses of truth; it is a cognitive act. As a matter of fact, however, the moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do exist thus unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at work, as careful introspection will show, far more than we usually suppose. Still, where long familiarity with a certain class of effects, even æsthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional excitability as much as it has sharpened taste and judgment, we do get the intellectual emotion, if such it can be called, pure and undefiled. And the dryness of it, the paleness, the absence of all glow, as it may exist in a thoroughly expert critic's mind, not only shows us what an altogether different thing it is from the 'coarser' emotions we considered first, but makes us suspect that almost the entire difference lies in the fact that the bodily sounding- board, vibrating in the one case, is in the other mute. "Not so very bad" is, in a person of consummate taste, apt to be the highest limit of approving expression. "Rien ne me choque" is said to have been Chopin's superlative of praise of new music.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world, known in the days of Abraham, and bursts upon the traveller like a vision of paradise amidst a burning and barren wilderness of sand; it is watered by the never-failing rivers Abana and Pharpar (which Naaman of old preferred to all the waters of Israel), and embosomed in luxuriant gardens of flowers and groves of tropical fruit trees; hence glorified by Eastern poets as "the Eye of the Desert." But a far higher vision than this earthly paradise was in store for Saul as he approached the city. A supernatural light from heaven, brighter than the Syrian sun, suddenly flashed around him at midday, and Jesus of Nazareth, whom he persecuted in his humble disciples, appeared to him in his glory as the exalted Messiah, asking him in the Hebrew tongue: "Shaûl, Shaûl, why persecutest thou Me?363 It was a question both of rebuke and of love, and it melted his heart. He fell prostrate to the ground. He saw and heard, he trembled and obeyed, he believed and rejoiced. As he rose from the earth he saw no man. Like a helpless child, blinded by the dazzling light, he was led to Damascus, and after three days of blindness and fasting he was cured and baptized—not by Peter or James or John, but—by one of the humble disciples whom he had come to destroy. The haughty, self-righteous, intolerant, raging Pharisee was changed into an humble, penitent, grateful, loving servant of Jesus. He threw away self-righteousness, learning, influence, power, prospects, and cast in his lot with a small, despised sect at the risk of his life. If there ever was an honest, unselfish, radical, and effective change of conviction and conduct, it was that of Saul of Tarsus. He became, by a creative act of the Holy Spirit, a "new creature in Christ Jesus."364 We have three full accounts of this event in the Acts, one from Luke, two from Paul himself, with slight variations in detail, which only confirm the essential harmony.365 Paul also alludes to it five or six times in his Epistles.366 In all these passages he represents the change as an act brought about by a direct intervention of Jesus, who revealed himself in his glory from heaven, and struck conviction into his mind like lightning at midnight. He compares it to the creative act of God when He commanded the light to shine out of darkness.367 He lays great stress on the fact that he was converted and called to the apostolate directly by Christ, without any human agency; that he learned his gospel of free and universal grace by revelation, and not from the older apostles, whom he did not even see till three years after his call.368 The conversion, indeed, was not a moral compulsion, but included the responsibility of assent or dissent. God converts nobody by force or by magic. He made man free, and acts upon him as a moral being.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  CHAPTER VI. THE GREAT TRIBULATION. (MATT. 24:21.) § 37. The Roman Conflagration and the Neronian Persecution. "And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I wondered with a great wonder."—Apoc. 17:6. Literature. I. Tacitus: Annales, 1. XV., c. 38–44. Suetonius: Nero, chs. 16 and 38 (very brief). Sulpicius Severus: Hist. Sacra, 1. II., c. 41. He gives to the Neronian persecution a more general character. II. Ernest Renan: L’Antechrist. Paris, deuxième ed., 1873. Chs. VI. VIII, pp. 123 sqq. Also his Hibbert Lectures, delivered in London, 1880, on Rome and Christianity. L. Friedländer: Sittengeschichte Roms, I. 6, 27; III. 529. Hermann Schiller: Geschichte der röm. Kaiserzeit unter der Regierung des Nero. Berlin, 1872 (173–179; 424 sqq.; 583 sqq.). Hausrath: N. T.liche Zeitgeschichte, III. 392 sqq. (2d ed., 1875). Theod. Keim: Aus dem Urchristenthum. Zürich, 1878, pp. 171–181. Rom u. das Christenthum, 1881, pp. 132 sqq. Karl Wieseler: Die Christenverfolgungen der Cäsaren. 1878. G. Uhlhorn: The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism. Engl. transl. by Smyth and Ropes, N. Y. 1879, pp. 241–250. C. F. Arnold: Die Neron. Christenverfolgung. Leipz. 1888. The preaching of Paul and Peter in Rome was an epoch in the history of the church. It gave an impulse to the growth of Christianity. Their martyrdom was even more effective in the end: it cemented the bond of union between the Jewish and Gentile converts, and consecrated the soil of the heathen metropolis. Jerusalem crucified the Lord, Rome beheaded and crucified his chief apostles and plunged the whole Roman church into a baptism of blood. Rome became, for good and for evil, the Jerusalem of Christendom, and the Vatican hill the Golgotha of the West. Peter and Paul, like a new Romulus and Remus, laid the foundation of a spiritual empire vaster and more enduring than that of the Caesars. The cross was substituted for the sword as the symbol of conquest and power.514 But the change was effected at the sacrifice of precious blood. The Roman empire was at first, by its laws of justice, the protector of Christianity, without knowing its true character, and came to the rescue of Paul on several critical occasions, as in Corinth through the Proconsul Annaeus Gallio, in Jerusalem through the Captain Lysias, and in Caesarea through the Procurator Festus. But now it rushed into deadly conflict with the new religion, and opened, in the name of idolatry and patriotism, a series of intermittent persecutions, which ended at last in the triumph of the banner of the cross at the Milvian bridge. Formerly a restraining power that kept back for a while the outbreak of Antichrist,515 it now openly assumed the character of Antichrist with fire and sword.516 Nero. The first of these imperial persecutions with which the Martyrdom of Peter and Paul is connected by ecclesiastical tradition, took place in the tenth year of Nero’s reign, A.D.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Chinese were isolated from the other Axial peoples, so they knew nothing about the extraordinary career of Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s old pupil, who conquered the Persian empire in 333 when he routed the army of Darius III at the river Issus in Cilicia. He then led his army on a rampage through Asia, creating an empire that included most of the known world. His progress had been violent and ruthless. He brooked no opposition, but mercilessly destroyed any cities that had the temerity to stand in his way and massacred their populations. His empire was based on fear, and yet Alexander had a vision of political and cultural unity. But the empire did not survive his early death in Babylonia in 323. Almost immediately fighting broke out among his leading generals, and for the next two decades the lands conquered by Alexander were devastated by the battles of these six diadochoi (“successors”). The “peace” of the empire had given way to destructive warfare. Finally, at the very end of the century, two of the diadochoi eliminated the others and divided Alexander’s territories between them. Ptolemy, one of the most shrewd of Alexander’s generals, took Egypt, the African coast, Palestine, and southern Syria, while Seleucus, who had been appointed satrap of Babylonia by Alexander, controlled large parts of the old Persian empire, including Iran. Seleucus settled the far eastern boundary by relinquishing the Indian territories, which proved impossible to maintain. Alexander made little impression on the people of India. He conquered only a few minor tribes, and his invasion was not even mentioned by some of the early Indian historians. His achievement was not the conquest of India, but the feat of actually getting there, and his two years in India were more of a geographical expedition than a military campaign. Alexander seemed the embodiment of the Greek ethos. He had been brought up on the Homeric myths, inspired by the ideals of Athens, and tutored by Aristotle. Greece had not participated as fully in the religious vision of the Axial Age as the other regions. Some of its most startling “axial” achievements had been military. Alexander’s two-year adventure in India was another such moment: a Greek army had reached what they regarded as the end of the earth. They had pitted themselves against the ultimate as bravely as the yogins had struggled to break through the limits of the human psyche. Where mystics had conquered interior space, Alexander explored the farthest reaches of the physical world. Like many of the Axial sages, he was constantly “straining after more.”56 He wanted to go farther into India than the Persian kings, and reach the ocean that, he believed, circled the earth. It was the kind of “enlightenment” that would always appeal to Western explorers57 but very different from the nibbana or moksha, characterized by self-effacement, ahimsa, and compassion, sought by the Indian mystics.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘My lady, the fact that I am enamoured should not excite the wonder of anyone who is wise, and especially not your own, because you are worthy of my love. For albeit old men are naturally deficient in the powers required for lovemaking, they do not necessarily lack a ready will, or a just appreciation of what should be loved. On the contrary, in this respect their longer experience gives them an advantage over the young. The hope which sustains an old man like myself in loving one who is loved, as you are, by many young men, is founded on what I have often observed in places where I have seen ladies eating lupines and leeks whilst taking a meal out of doors. For although no part of the leek is good, yet the part which is less objectionable and more pleasing to the palate is the root, which you ladies are generally drawn by some aberration of the appetite to hold in the hand while you eat the leaves, which are not only worthless, but have an unpleasant taste. How am I to know, my lady, whether you are not equally eccentric in choosing your lovers? For if this were so, I should be the one you would choose, and the others would be cast aside.’ The gentlewoman, who along with the others was feeling somewhat abashed, replied: ‘Master Alberto, you have given us a charming and very sound reproof for our presumptuousness. Your love is none the less precious to me, since it proceeds from so patently wise and excellent a man. And therefore, saving my honour, you are free to ask of me what you will, and regard it as yours.’ The doctor stood up with his companions, thanked the lady, took his leave of her amid much laughter and merriment, and departed. Thus the lady, thinking she would score a victory, underestimated the object of her raillery and was herself defeated. And if you ladies are wise, you will guard against following her example. * * * Already the sun was dipping towards the west, and the heat of the day had largely abated, when the stories told by the seven young ladies and the three young men were found to be at an end. Accordingly their queen addressed them, in gracious tones, as follows:

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  If we stood on a riverbank, we recognized that the body of water in front of us was a river rather than a pond or an ocean because we had the form of a river in our minds. But this universal concept was not something that we had created for our own convenience. It existed in its own right. In this world, for example, no two things were truly equal, yet we had an idea of absolute equality, even though we had no experience of it in our everyday lives. “Things have some fixed being or essence of their own,” Plato made Socrates say. “They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature.” 78 The Greek word idea did not mean “idea” in the modern English sense. An idea or eidos was not a private, subjective mental construct, but a “form,” “pattern,” or “essence.” A form or idea was an archetype, the original pattern that gave each particular entity its distinctive shape and condition. Plato’s philosophical notion can be seen as a rationalized and internalized expression of the ancient perennial philosophy in which every earthly object or experience has its counterpart in the divine sphere. 79 This perception had been crucial to pre-Axial religion, so Plato’s idea of a world of absolutes that were imperfectly represented in the mundane sphere would have seemed less strange to his contemporaries than to a modern reader. The forms manifested themselves in the world of time, but they were superior, numinous, and timeless. They gave shape to our lives but transcended them. Everything here below was constantly changing and decaying. Plato pointed out that even though a beautiful person lost her looks and died, beauty itself continued to exist. She had not possessed absolute beauty—no earthly entity does—but she was informed by beauty and participated in this eternal quality. Her beauty was very different from the beauty of her sister, or from the beauty of a poem, a mountain, or a building, but people recognized it because each of us had innate knowledge of the eternal forms. When we fell in love with a beautiful person, we surrendered to the beauty that was revealed in her. The enlightened person will have trained him- or herself (Plato believed that women could enjoy this knowledge too) to see through the imperfect earthly manifestation of beauty to the eternal form that lay beneath it. The realm of the forms was thus primary, and our material world was secondary and derivative, just as, in the perennial philosophy, the celestial sphere was superior and more enduring than the mundane. The forms had an intensity of reality that transitory phenomena could not possess.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Buddha was convinced that though nibbana was not a supernatural reality, it was a transcendent state because it lay beyond the capacities of those who had not achieved this inner awakening. There were no words to describe it, because our language is derived from the sense data of our unhappy existence, in which we cannot conceive of a life entirely devoid of ego. In purely mundane terms, nibbana was “nothing,” because it corresponded to no reality that we could recognize. But those who had managed to find this sacred peace discovered that they lived an immeasurably richer life.90 Later monotheists would speak about God in very similar terms, claiming that God was “nothing” because “he” was not another being; and that it was more accurate to say that he did not exist, because our notions of existence were too limited to apply to the divine.91 They would also claim that a selfless, compassionate life would bring people into God’s presence. But like other Indian sages and mystics, the Buddha found the idea of a personalized deity too limiting. The Buddha always denied the existence of a supreme being, because an authoritative, overseeing deity could become another prop or fetter that would impede enlightenment. The Pali texts never mention brahman. The Buddha came from the republic of Sakka, far from the Brahminical heartlands, and may have been unfamiliar with the concept. But his rejection of God or gods was calm and measured. He simply put them peacefully out of his mind. To inveigh vehemently against these beliefs would have been an unskillful assertion of ego. The old gods sometimes played a part in his life. Mara, god of death, for example, sometimes appeared in the Pali texts as the tempter of the Buddha, advising him to take an easier path, almost as though he were an aspect of the Buddha’s own mind. Yet when the Buddha tried to give his disciples a hint of what nibbana was like, he often mixed negative with positive terms. Nibbana was the “extinction of greed, hatred and delusion”; it was “taintless,” “unweakening,” “undisintegrating,” “inviolable,” “non-distress,” and “unhostility.” It canceled out everything that we find unbearable. One of the most frequent epithets used to describe nibbana was “deathless.” But positive things could be said of nibbana too: it was “the Truth,” “the Subtle,” “the Other Shore,” “Peace,” “the Everlasting,” “the Supreme Goal,” “Purity, Freedom, Independence, the Island, the Shelter, the Harbour, the Refuge, the Beyond.”92 It was the supreme goal of humans and gods alike, an incomprehensible serenity, and an utterly safe refuge. Many of these images are reminiscent of words later used by monotheists to describe their experience of the ineffable God.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  We moderns experience thinking as something that we do. But Plato envisaged it as something that happened to the mind: the objects of thought were living realities in the psyche of the person who learned to see them. This vision of beauty was not merely an aesthetic experience. Once people had experienced it, they found that they had undergone a profound moral change and could no longer live in a shabby, unethical way. A person who had achieved this knowledge could “bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness, but true goodness, because he will be in contact not with a reflection but with the truth.” He had undergone a fundamental transformation: “having brought forth and nurtured true goodness, he will have the privilege of being beloved of God, and becoming, if ever men can, immortal himself.”87 Plato’s description of beauty was clearly similar to what others called God or the Way: This Beauty will not appear to the imagination like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or science, or like beauty that has its seat in something other than itself, be it in a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatsoever. Like God, brahman, or nibbana, it was utterly transcendent: “absolute, existing alone within itself, unique, eternal.”88 But the vision of beauty was not the end of the quest. It pointed inexorably toward the Good, the essence of everything that human beings desired. All the other forms were subsumed within the Good, and were nourished by it. In the Good, all things became one. The Good was indescribable and Plato’s Socrates could speak of it only in parables, most memorably in the allegory of the cave in The Republic.89 Here Socrates imagined a group of men who had been chained up all their lives like prisoners in a cave. They were turned away from the sunlight and could see only shadows reflected from the outside world onto the rocky wall. This was an image of the unenlightened human condition in which it was impossible to see the forms directly. We were so conditioned by our deprived circumstances that we took these ephemeral shadows for true reality. If we were liberated from this captivity we would be dazzled and bewildered by the brilliant sunlight and vibrant existence of the world outside the cave. It would probably be too much for us, and we would want to go back to our familiar twilight existence.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Confucius was horrified by the constant warfare that threatened to obliterate the small principalities. Yet, to his dismay, they did not seem fully alert to the danger. Lu could not compete militarily with a large state like Qi, but instead of marshaling all its resources to meet this external threat, the baronial families—all motivated by greed and vainglory—were fighting a self-destructive civil war. If the “three families” had observed the li correctly, this state of affairs could never have come to pass. In the past, the rites had helped to curb the danger of violence and vendetta, and had mitigated the horror of battle. They must do so again. As a ritualist, Confucius had spent far more time on the study of ceremony and the classics than on the princely arts of archery and chariot driving. 6 He now redefined the role of the junzi: the true gentleman should be a scholar, not a warrior. Instead of fighting for power, the junzi must study the rules of correct behavior, as prescribed by the traditional li of family, political, military, and social life. Confucius never claimed to be an original thinker. “I have transmitted what was taught to me without making up anything of my own,” he once said. “I have been faithful to and loved the ancients.” 7 Only a sage, who had been blessed with divine insight, could break with tradition. “I am simply one who loves the past, and who is diligent in investigating it.” 8 And yet, despite these disclaimers, Confucius was an innovator. He was bent on “reanimating the Old to gain knowledge of the New.” 9 The world had changed, but there could be no fruitful development unless there was also a measure of continuity. Some of the ways in which Confucius interpreted tradition were radically different in emphasis. The old religion had focused on Heaven: people had often performed the sacrifices simply to gain the favor of the gods and spirits, but Confucius concentrated on this world. Like his contemporary Zichan, prime minister of Cheng, he believed that it was better to focus on what we knew. Indeed, he preferred not to speak of Heaven at all. His pupil Zigong noted: “We are allowed to hear our Master’s views on culture and the outward insignia of goodness, but about the ways of Heaven, he will not tell us anything at all.” 10 Confucius was not interested in metaphysics and discouraged theological chatter. When Zilu asked him how a junzi should minister to the gods, he replied: “Till you have learned to serve men, how can you serve spirits?” And when Zilu persisted, and asked what the life of the ancestors was actually like, Confucius replied again: “Till you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?” 11 Confucius was no skeptic. He practiced the traditional ancestral rites punctiliously, and was filled with numinous awe when he thought of Heaven.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  Her breasts were not heavy but shaped like cones with perfectly central nipples. The other girl had big, drooping breasts above a waist you could encircle with two hands. As I lay on my back, shifting my head away from the shoulder obscuring my view, I could see her thin frame silhouetted against the sky, and the heavy teardrops of her breasts undulating in the wake of her movements. I thought that her body couldn’t possibly contain what she must have buried into it as she sat astride a particularly well endowed member of the group. She too had an angelic disposition, and we were an amicable trio with a constant appetite and without aggro. There was another girl, who stood head and shoulders above all of us and who coiled herself up when she fucked as if trying to leave more room for the other smaller body ramming her so zealously, and I remember that once she burst a string of pearls with the pressure of her congested neck. Nothing ever disturbed the unspooling of those compact segments of afternoon, their rhythm slowed further by the humming of the traffic absorbed into the buzzing of insects and, even though the clattering of those pearls on the ground was barely discernible and this girl in her rapture didn’t moan any louder than anyone else, I was surprised by such a transport of ecstasy. I started to think: ‘Can a woman really experience such overwhelming pleasure that her body undergoes this sort of external transformation?’ I was at my leisure to watch the fixed grimaces on some men’s faces or, on others, the distant, absent mask, as their bodies reached maximum tension, when (in, for example, the classic position) they arch from the small of their back right up to their necks, peeling away from their partner’s body with the same robust uplift as the prow of a schooner over the sea. But I watched women much less and, without the mirror they could have held up to me, I had no image of my own body at such moments even though I am not short on narcissistic tendencies. I knew how to take up the right position and what moves to make; beyond that, everything was diluted into sensations that I didn’t connect with any visible manifestations. If I can put it like this, these feelings didn’t take on a physical form, even less so in the suave pleasures of the open air. There were times when I liked to withdraw, to detach myself from the great writhing on the beach mattresses, and to lie down on the wall just as I was. The light was too bright to stare up at the sky. If I turned my head to one side, the horizon was on a level with my eyes; on the other side I had to close them because the light bounced off the pale paving stones.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The “great sayings” are not accessible to normal, secular modes of thought. They do not proceed from logic or sense perception, but can be apprehended only after a long period of training, meditation, and cultivating a habit of inwardness that transforms our way of looking at ourselves and the world. A reader who has not adopted the Upanishadic method will not be able to comprehend its conclusions. The word “Upanishad” meant “to sit down near to.” This was an esoteric knowledge imparted by mystically inclined sages to a few spiritually gifted pupils who sat at their feet. It was not for everybody. Most Aryans continued to worship and sacrifice in the traditional manner, since they lacked either the talent or the desire to undertake this long and arduous quest. The sages were exploring new ways of being religious. In penetrating the uncharted world of the psyche, they were pioneers, and only a talented few would be able to accompany them. But life was changing, and this meant that some people needed to find a spirituality to meet their altered circumstances. The first Upanishads were set in a society that was at the very beginning of the process of urbanization. 8 There is little agricultural imagery in these texts, but many references to weaving, pottery, and metallurgy. People were traveling long distances to consult these sages, which meant that transport was improving. Many of the debates took place in the court of a raja. Life was becoming more settled, and some had more leisure for contemplation. The Brhadaranyaka was almost certainly composed in the kingdom of Videha, a frontier state on the most easterly point of Aryan expansion in the seventh century. 9 Videha was scorned as an unsophisticated, newfangled place by the Brahmins in the “Land of the Arya” to the west, but there was a great admixture of peoples in these eastern territories, including Indo-Aryan settlers from earlier waves of migration, tribes from Iran (later known as the Malla, Vajji, and Sakya), as well as peoples who were indigenous to India. These new encounters were intellectually stimulating. The renouncers were also generating fresh ideas, as they experimented with their ascetic lifestyle. Certainly the two earliest Upanishads both reflect this intense intellectual and spiritual excitement.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Rabbi Akiba, who was killed by the Romans in 132 CE, taught that the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” was “the great principle of the Torah.”40 To show disrespect to any human being who had been created in God’s image was seen by the rabbis as a denial of God himself and tantamount to atheism. Murder was a sacrilege: “Scripture instructs us that whatsoever sheds human blood is regarded as if he had diminished the divine image.”41 God had created only one man at the beginning of time to teach us that destroying only one human life was equivalent to annihilating the entire world, while to save a life redeemed the whole of humanity.42 To humiliate anybody—even a slave or a non-Jew—was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious defacing of God’s image.43 To spread a scandalous, lying story about another person was to deny the existence of God.44 Religion was inseparable from the practice of habitual respect to all other human beings. You could not worship God unless you practiced the Golden Rule and honored your fellow humans, whoever they were. In Rabbinic Judaism, study was as important as meditation in other traditions. It was a spiritual quest: the word for study, darash, meant “to search,” “to go in pursuit of.” It led not to an intellectual grasp of somebody else’s ideas, but to new insight. So rabbinic midrash (“exegesis”) could go further than the original text, discover what it did not say, and find an entirely fresh interpretation; as one rabbinic text explained: “Matters that had not been disclosed to Moses were disclosed to Rabbi Akiba and his generation.”45 Study was also inseparable from action. When Rabbi Hillel had expounded the Golden Rule to the skeptical pagan, he told him, “Go and study it.” The truth of the Golden Rule would be revealed only if you put it into practice in your daily life. Study was a dynamic encounter with God. One day, somebody came to Rabbi Akiba and told him that Ben Azzai was sitting expounding the scripture with fire flashing around him. Rabbi Akiba went to investigate. Was Ben Azzai, perhaps, discussing Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, which inspired the mystically inclined to make their own ascent to heaven? No, Ben Azzai replied. I was only linking up the words of the Torah with one another, and then with the words of the prophets, and the prophets with the writings, and the words rejoiced, as when they were delivered from Sinai, and they were sweet as at their original utterance.46 Scripture was not a closed book, and revelation was not a historical event that had happened in a distant time. It was renewed every time a Jew confronted the text, opened himself to it, and applied it to his own situation. This dynamic vision could set the world afire.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  100 The hymns of Ugarit show that the approach of Baal, the divine warrior, convulsed the entire cosmos: when he advanced on his enemies with his retinue of “holy ones,” brandishing his thunderbolt, The heavens roll up like a scroll, And all their hosts languish As a vine leaf withers As the fig droops. 101 Baal’s holy voice shattered the earth, and the mountains quaked at his roar. 102 When he returned victoriously to Mount Sapan, his voice had thundered from his palace, and brought the rain. 103 His worshipers shared his struggle against drought and death by reenacting these battles in the liturgy of Ugarit. After his life-and-death battle with Mot, Baal had been joyously reunited with Anat, his sister-spouse. His worshipers celebrated this too in ritualized sex in order to activate the sacred energy of the soil and bring a good harvest. We know that, to the disgust of their prophets, the Israelites took part in these sacred orgies well into the eighth century and beyond. In the very earliest texts of the Bible—isolated verses written in about the tenth century and inserted into the later narratives —Yahweh was presented as a divine warrior just like Baal. At this time, the tribes were living a violent, dangerous life and needed the support of their god. The poems usually depicted Yahweh marching from his home in the southern mountains and coming to the aid of his people in the highlands. Thus the Song of Deborah: Yahweh, when you set out from Seir, As you trod the land of Edom, Earth shook, the heavens quaked, The clouds dissolved into water. The mountains melted before Yahweh, Before Yahweh, the God of Israel. 104 In another of these early poems, when Yahweh comes from Mount Paran, “he makes the earth tremble,” and at his approach the ancient mountains are dislodged; the everlasting hills sink into the ground. His fury blazed against the primal sea and the nations that opposed Israel quaked with terror. 105 In early Israel, there was no central sanctuary but a number of temples, at Shechem, Gilgal, Shiloh, Bethel, Sinai, and Hebron. As far as we can tell from isolated texts in the later biblical narrative, the Ark of the Covenant was carried from one shrine to another, and the Israelites gathered at their local temple to renew their covenant treaties in the presence of Yahweh.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  6 This too would become one of the principles of the Axial Age. The Aryans had no elaborate shrines and temples. Sacrifice was offered in the open air on a small, level piece of land, marked off from the rest of the settlement by a furrow. The seven original creations were all symbolically represented in this arena: Earth in the soil, Water in the vessels, Fire in the hearth; the stone Sky was present in the flint knife, the Plant in the crushed soma stalks, the Bull in the victim, and the first Man in the priest. And the gods, it was thought, were also present. The hotr priest, expert in the liturgical chant, would sing a hymn to summon devas to the feast. When they had entered the sacred arena, the gods sat down on the freshly mown grass strewn around the altar to listen to these hymns of praise. Since the sound of these inspired syllables was itself a god, as the song filled the air and entered their consciousness, the congregation felt surrounded by and infused with divinity. Finally the primordial sacrifice was repeated. The cattle were slain, the soma pressed, and the priest laid the choicest portions of the victims onto the fire, so that Agni could convey them to the land of the gods. The ceremony ended with a holy communion, as priest and participants shared a festal meal with the deities, eating the consecrated meat and drinking the intoxicating soma, which seemed to lift them to another dimension of being. 7 The sacrifice brought practical benefits too. It was commissioned by a member of the community, who hoped that those devas who had responded to his invitation and attended the sacrifice would help him in the future. Like any act of hospitality, the ritual placed an obligation on the divinities to respond in kind, and the hotr often reminded them to protect the patron’s family, crops, and herd. The sacrifice also enhanced the patron’s standing in the community. Like the gods, his human guests were now in his debt, and by providing the cattle for the feast and giving the officiating priests a handsome gift, he had demonstrated that he was a man of substance. 8 The benefits of religion were purely material and this-worldly. People wanted the gods to provide them with cattle, wealth, and security. At first the Aryans had entertained no hope of an afterlife, but by the end of the second millennium, some were beginning to believe that wealthy people who had commissioned a lot of sacrifices would be able to join the gods in paradise after their death. 9 This slow, uneventful life came to an end when the Aryans discovered modern technology.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Greeks were learning to think with logical, analytical rigor, and yet periodically they felt the need to surrender themselves to the irrational. The Athenian philosopher Proclus (c. 412–485 CE) believed that the initiation of Eleusis created a sympatheia, a profound affinity with the ritual, so that they lost themselves and became wholly absorbed in the rite “in a way that is unintelligible to us and divine.” Not all the mystai achieved this; some were simply “stricken with panic,” and remained imprisoned in their fear, but others managed to “assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become one with the gods, and experience divine possession.”75 In India, people were beginning to achieve similar bliss in the techniques of introspection. There was no such interior journey at Eleusis; this was quite different from the solitary ekstasis achieved by some of the mystics of the Axial Age. The illumination of Eleusis did not happen in a remote forest hermitage, but in the presence of thousands of people. Eleusis belonged to the old, pre-Axial world. By imitating Demeter and Persephone, reenacting their passage from death to life, the mystai left their individual selves behind and became one with their divine models. The same was true of the mysteries of Dionysus.76 Here too the participants united themselves to a suffering god, following Dionysus’s frenzied wanderings when, driven mad by his stepmother, Hera, he had journeyed through the forests of Greece and through the eastern lands of Egypt, Syria, and Phrygia in search of healing. The mythical stories about Dionysus spoke of destructive insanity and terrifying extremity, but his city cult was orderly, though there was a carnival atmosphere, with just a hint of transgression.77 Men wore women’s clothes, like the young Dionysus while he was hiding from Hera. Everybody drank wine, and there was music and dancing. The Maenads, Dionysus’s female devotees, ran through the streets wearing crowns of ivy leaves and carrying magical willow wands. But sometimes, the whole group fell into a trance, a heightened state of consciousness, which spread from one celebrant to another. When this happened, worshipers knew that Dionysus was present among them. They called this experience of divine possession entheos: “within is a god.”

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  We could not talk about this “thing,” but if we modeled ourselves upon it, it became—somehow—known to us. Laozi’s elliptical poems made no logical sense. He deliberately confused his readers by pelting them with paradox. He told them that the sublime was nameless, and yet a few lines later he said that the “named” and the “nameless” came from the same source. The sage ruler was supposed to hold these contradictions in his heart and become aware of the inadequacy of his ordinary thought processes. Laozi’s chapters were not speculations, but points for meditation. He wrote down only the conclusions, and did not trace the steps that led to these insights, because the sage ruler had to journey down the Way by himself, going from the manifest to the unseen, and finally to the darkest of the dark. He could not achieve these insights at second hand, relying on other people’s reports of the Way. The Chinese had their own form of yoga ( zuo-wang ), which taught them to shut out the outside world and close down their ordinary modes of perception. Zhuangzi had called this “forgetting,” the discarding of knowledge. Laozi occasionally referred to these yogic disciplines, 34 but did not describe them in any detail; they were, however, essential to the mystical process he outlined. The only way the reader could evaluate his conclusions was to make the journey. Laozi often called the unseen reality “the Void,” because it could not be defined, a name that suggested an emptiness that the busy yu wei mind feared. Our nature abhors a vacuum, and we fill our minds with ideas, words, and thoughts that seem to be full of life but take us nowhere. In the Daodejing, however, the Void is also called the Womb of all being, because it brings forth new life. 35 Laozi’s images of the Void, the Valley, and the Hollow all speak of something that is not there. Besides pointing to the indescribable mystery of being, they also point to the kenosis of the wu wei mind, once the ego has been lost. There must be a void in the being of the sage ruler. In the trance of meditation, he could experience the “emptiness” that, according to Laozi, was a return to the authentic humanity that people had enjoyed before they were infected by civilization, which had introduced a false artifice into human life. By interfering with nature, human beings had lost their Way. While other creatures kept to the Way designed for them, humans had separated themselves from their dao by constant, busy yu wei reflection: they made distinctions that did not exist, and formulated solemn principles of action that were simply egotistical projections. Laozi agreed with Zhuangzi about this. When the sage trained himself to lay aside these mental habits, he could return to his original nature, and get back on the right path. I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  At the beginning of time, he had hurled his glittering, deadly thunderbolt at Vritra, the three-headed dragon who had blocked the flow of the life-giving waters, so that the earth was parched with drought. Indra had thus made the world habitable by fighting terrify-ing battles against overwhelming odds, not by feebly sitting at home like Varuna. In the Vedic texts, all the attributes of Varuna—the administration of law, the guardianship of the truth, and the punishment of falsehood—pass to Indra. But the uncomfortable fact remained that for all his glamour, Indra was a killer, who had only managed to defeat Vritra by lying and cheating. This was the violent and troubled vision of a society constantly involved in desperate warfare. The Vedic hymns saw the entire cosmos convulsed by terrifying conflict and passionate rivalries. Devas and asuras fought each other in heaven, while the Aryans struggled for survival on earth. 34 This was an age of scarcity; the only way that the Aryans could establish themselves in the Indus Valley was by stealing the cattle of the indigenous settled communities—the earthly counterparts of the stay-at-home asuras. 35 The Aryans were hard-living, hard-drinking people who loved music, gambling, and wine. But even at this very early stage they showed spiritual genius. Shortly after they arrived in the Punjab, a learned elite began to compile the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda (“Knowledge in Verse”), the most prestigious portion of the Vedic scriptures. When completed, it would consist of 1,028 hymns, divided into ten books. This was just one part of a vast corpus of literature, which included anthologies of songs, mantras (short prose formulae used in ritual), and instructions for their recitation. These texts and poems had all been inspired; they were shruti, “that which is heard.” Revealed to the great seers ( rishis ) of antiquity, they were absolutely authoritative, unmarked by human redaction, divine, and eternal. Some hymns of the Rig Veda could be very old indeed, because by the time the Aryan tribes arrived in India, its language was already archaic. The poems were the property of a small group of seven priestly families, each with its own “copyrighted” collection, which they chanted during the sacrificial rituals. Family members learned the hymns by heart and transmitted them orally to the next generation; the Rig Veda was not committed to writing until the second millennium of the common era. Since the advent of literacy, our powers of memory have declined, and we find it hard to believe that people were able to learn such lengthy texts. But the Vedic scriptures were transmitted with impeccable accuracy, even after the archaic Sanskrit had become almost incomprehensible, and still today, the exact tonal accents and inflections of the original, long-lost language have been preserved, together with the ritually prescribed gestures of the arms and fingers.