The mountain air, being placed nearer to the Fountain of Life, fortifies health and prolongs life. Retreat in solitude and unbroken stillness, where air free of all pestilential exhalations and deep study are prerequisites for higher knowledge. Acrimony, antagonism, antipathy, enmity, and resentment are vexatious to the spirit. Singing promotes health and the development of the chest. And the expansion of the chest allows the noblest parts of our nature to unfold. By forcing chest expansion and lung exhalation, high altitudes foster spiritual temperament. Full breathing is a therapeutic agent, restorative and curative. By compelling chest expansion, the exercise of the thighs is far more efficient than any exercise of the arms. Keep smiling, for smile is the expression of the superior regions of the brain.
1. Ten Spiritual Commandments. 2. Ten Rules of Right. 3. Ten Injunctions for Theosophists. 4. Sixteen Cautions in Paragraphs. 5. True Theosophists defined attitudinally, ethically, and philosophically.
The religious philanthropist holds a position of his own, which cannot in any way concern or affect the Theosophist. He does not do good merely for the sake of doing good, but also as a means towards his own salvation. The secular philanthropist is really at heart a socialist, and nothing else; he hopes to make men happy and good by bettering their physical position. The direct effect of an appreciation of Theosophy is to make those charitable who were not so before. Theosophy creates the charity which afterwards, and of its own accord, makes itself manifest in works.
The absurd idea of an extra-cosmic personal God does not exist anywhere in our Cosmos or beyond — it is a philosophical impossibility. The God of Theosophy is Cosmos itself; our earth is His footstool. Our Deity, as the “God” of Spinoza and of the true Advaitī, neither thinks, nor creates, for it is All-thought and All-creation. Moreover, there is no over-soul or under-soul, but only One Infinite pre-Cosmic Substance and Thought, which remains in the Universe of Ideas. The first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested world is purely spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to our highest conceptions. Deity is a Unity, in which all other units in their infinite variety merge, and from which they are indistinguishable — except by the prism of Theistic Maya. Can the individual drops of the curling waves of the universal Ocean have independent existence? While the Theist proclaims his God a gigantic universal Being, the Theosophist declares that the One Absolute (or, rather, Absoluteness) is not-Being but an ever-developing cyclic evolution, the Perpetual Motion of Nature visible and invisible — moving and breathing, even during its long Pralayic Sleep. Apprehension of the term Logos, Verbum, or Vāch, the mystic divine voice of every nation and philosophy, by the spiritual intuition of those few who are not wilfully obtuse, will presage the dawn of One Universal Religion. Logos was never human reason with us. Logos is Divine Thought Concealed, i.e., a purely metaphysical concept far above and beyond the repulsive cerebrations of lower minds. Radiation, emanations, and their endless pantheistic differentiations are master-keys to the enquirer’s innermost perceptions, if he adopts the Platonic deductive method of study and reasoning from Universals to Particulars, i.e., from Cosmogenesis to Anthropogenesis.
An instant New York Times bestseller. Over 1 million copies sold! Two spiritual giants. Five days. One timeless question. Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships—or, as they would say, because of them—they are two of the most joyful people on the planet. In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness's eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life's inevitable suffering? They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy. This book offers us a rare opportunity to experience their astonishing and unprecedented week together, from the first embrace to the final good-bye. We get to listen as they explore the Nature of True Joy and confront each of the Obstacles of Joy—from fear, stress, and anger to grief, illness, and death. They then offer us the Eight Pillars of Joy, which provide the foundation for lasting happiness. Throughout, they include stories, wisdom, and science. Finally, they share their daily Joy Practices that anchor their own emotional and spiritual lives. The Archbishop has never claimed sainthood, and the Dalai Lama considers himself a simple monk. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.
It is only by extending empathy and sympathy that the individual can expand into the divine and merge with universal love, the spirit of which is self-sacrifice. By extending our love to all men, aye, to animals as well, we joy and sorrow with them, and expand our souls towards The One that ever both sorrows and joys with all, in an eternal bliss in which the pleasure of joy and the pain of sorrow are not.
