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 CHAPTER I
STREAMS OF RAPTURE
O THOU of whom I am the instrument,
O secret Spirit and Nature housed in me,
Let all my mortal being now be blent
In Thy still glory of divinity.
I have given my mind to be dug Thy channel mind,
I have offered up my will to be Thy will :
Let nothing of myself be left behind
In our union mystic and unutterable.
My heart shall throb with the world-beats of Thy love;
My body become Thy engine for earth-use;
In my nerves and veins Thy rapture's streams shall
move;
My thoughts shall be hounds of Light for Thy power to
loose.
Keep only my soul to adore eternally
And meet Thee in each form and soul of Thee.
-Surrender by Sri Aurobindo
Normally I have no problem in letting my imagination
run riot in thinking of things that have never happened,
things that are unlikely to happen and the things which
others do not dream of. But I am dumbfounded when I
try to think of the time when I first saw you, Arun, at
Daventry in England almost seventeen years ago. You
were the tiniest baby I have ever seen and had just
graced my younger daughter Rashmi’s house a couple of
months earlier than you were expected. That was the
first thing you had in common with Einstein. The other
two were that both of you were born in March and had
rather biggish heads on your shoulders. Now you have grown up to be a handsome young man with impeccable
manners, outstanding academic record and great talent
for remaining aloof from most of the Trinidadian
maidens who gravitate towards you.
I won’t burden you with advice. I know you are and will
remain good: but what I want you to do is to be
interested in your companions and surroundings. And
here, my dearest grandson, is the whole secret of life – as
you treat the world so will it treat you. Once you realize
that both the physical world and living life are divine,
you will always treat them with reverence. Hence the
title of this book and the poem of Aurobindo which
begins it.
There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of
conduct each valid on its own plane. Divinity calls us
higher and not lower; from the conflict of the two planes
it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly
practical, above the purely ethical consciousness. It
replaces the conception of social duty by a divine
obligation.
There are three great steps by which action rises out of
the human into the divine plane leaving the bondage of
the lower for the liberty of a higher law. The first step is
the selfless sacrifice of works, and here the insistence is
on action. The second is knowledge of the true nature of
the self and the world, and here the insistence is on
knowledge; but the sacrifice of works continues and the
path of Works becomes one with but does not disappear
into the path of Knowledge. The last step is meditation
and seeking of the supreme Self as the Divine Being,
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and here the insistence is on devotion; but the
knowledge is not subordinated, only raised, vitalized and
fulfilled, and still the sacrifice of works continues; the
double path becomes the triune way of knowledge,
works and devotion.
A great example of selfless works comes from ancient
Greece.
As the seventh century BC drew to a close the bitterness
of the helpless poor against the legally entrenched rich
had brought Athens to the edge of revolution. It seems
incredible that at this juncture in Athenian affairs, so
often repeated in the history of nations, a man should
have been found who, without any act of violence or any
bitterness of speech, was able to persuade the rich and
the poor to a compromise that not only averted social
chaos but established a new and more generous political
and economic order for the entire remainder of Athens’
independent career. Solon’s peaceful revolution is one of
the encouraging miracles of history. “Many undeserving
men are rich,” he tells us, “while their betters are poor.
But we will not exchange what we are for what they
have, since the one gift abides while the other passes
from man to man.” The riches of the rich “are no greater
than his, whose only possessions are stomach, lungs and
feet that bring him joy, not pain; the blooming charms of
lad or maid; an existence ever in harmony with the
changing seasons of life.”
While recognizing that virtue is important, Solon does
not link it with recognizable distinctions: Wisdom is an
invisible property, the measure of which is not easily
known. And yet only by it can all other things be given a
standard.
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In 572 BC, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as
archon for twenty-two years, Solon retired from office
into private life: and having bound Athens through the
oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten
years, he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and
the East. It was now that he made his famous remark –
“I grow old while always learning.”
But the king who became a philosopher after his studies
came from the ancient Roman Empire – Marcus
Aurelius.

CHAPTER II
PHILOSOPHER KING – MARCUS AURELIUS
His early life (121-161)
His father died while Marcus was yet a boy, and he was
adopted by his grandfather, Annius Verus. In the first
pages of his "Meditations" he has left us an account,
unique in antiquity, of his education by near relatives
and by tutors of distinction; diligence, gratitude and
hardiness seem to have been its chief characteristics.
From his earliest years he enjoyed the friendship and
patronage on the Emperor Hadrian, who bestowed on
him the honour of the equestrian order when he was only
six years old, made him a member of the Salian
priesthood at eight, and compelled Antoninus Pius
immediately after his own adoption to adopt as sons and
heirs both the young Marcus and Ceionius Commodus,
known later as the Emperor Lucius Verus. In honour of
his adopted father he changed his name from M. Julius
Aurelius Verus to M. Aurelius Antoninus. By the will of
Hadrian he espoused Faustina, the daughter of
Antoninus Pius. He was raised to the consularship in
140, and in 147 received the "tribunician power".
His reign (161-180)
In all the later years of the life of Antoninus Pius,
Marcus was his constant companion and adviser. On the
death of the former (7 March, 161) Marcus was
immediately acknowledged as emperor by the Senate.
Acting entirely on his own initiative he at once promoted
his adopted brother Lucius Verus to the position of
colleague, with equal rights as emperor.

Marcus was scarcely seated on the throne when the Picts
commenced to threaten in Britain the recently erected
Wall of Antoninus. The Chatti and Chauci attempted to
cross the Rhine and the upper reaches of the Danube.
These attacks were easily repelled.
Not so with the outbreak in the Orient, which
commenced in 161 and did not cease until 166. The
destruction of an entire legion at Elegeia aroused the
emperors to the gravity of the situation. Lucius Verus
took the command of the troops in 162 and, through the
valor and skill of his lieutenants waged war over the
wide area of Syria, Cappadocia, Armenia, Mesopotamia,
and Media, was able to celebrate a glorious triumph in
166. For a people so long accustomed to peace as the
Romans were, this war was well nigh fatal. It taxed all
their resources, and the withdrawal of the legions from
the Danubian frontier gave an opportunity to the
Teutonic tribes to penetrate into the rich and tempting
territory. They became the advance-guard of the great
migration known as the "Wandering of the Nations",
which four centuries later culminated in the overthrow of
the Western Empire. The war against these invaders
commenced in 167, and in a short time had assumed
such threatening proportions as to demand the presence
of both emperors at the front.
Lucius Verus died in 169, and Marcus was left to carry
on the war alone. His difficulties were immeasurably
increased by the devastation wrought by the plague
carried westward by the returning legions of Verus, by
famine and earthquakes, and by inundations which
destroyed the vast granaries of Rome and their contents.
During the war with the Quadi in 174 there took place
the famous incident of the Thundering Legion. The

Roman army was surrounded by enemies with no chance
of escape, when a storm burst. The rain poured down in
refreshing showers on the Romans, while the enemy
were scattered with lightning and hail. The parched and
famishing Romans received the saving drops first on
their faces and parched throats, and afterwards in their
helmets and shields, to refresh their horses. Marcus
obtained a glorious victory as a result of this
extraordinary event, and his enemies were hopelessly
overthrown.
The last years of the reign of Marcus were saddened by
the appearance of a usurper, Avidius Cassius, in the
Orient, and by the consciousness that the empire was to
fall into unworthy hands when his son Commodus
should come to the throne. Marcus died at Vindobona or
Sirmium in Pannonia.
Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius was one of the best men of heathen
antiquity. Niebuhr calls him the noblest character of his
time. The highest offices in the empire were sometimes
conferred on his philosophic teachers, whose lectures he
attended even after he became emperor. In the midst of
the Parthian war he found time to keep a kind of private
diary, his famous "Meditations", or twelve short books
of detached thoughts and sentences in which he gave
over to posterity the results of a rigorous selfexamination.
With the exception of a few letters
discovered among the works of Fronto this history of his
inner life is the only work which we have from his pen.
As has been noted, Marcus was clearly familiar with the
discourses of Epictetus, quoting them a number of times. Epictetus’ fame in the second century is noted by
a number of ancient sources, being hailed as the greatest
of the Stoics and more popular than Plato. As Marcus
felt drawn towards Stoicism, then Epictetus would surely
have stood out as the most important Stoic of the time.
He was the only Roman emperor besides Julius Caesar
whose writings were to become part of the canon of
Western classics. His Meditations are a looselyorganized
set of thoughts relating to the stoic philosophy
which had been popular among the better-educated
citizens of Rome for some centuries. It stressed selfdiscipline,
virtue, and inner tranquility. Aurelius was
also a social reformer who worked for the improvement
of the lot of the poor, slaves, and convicted criminals.
Non-Christians in the Western World have often looked
to him as a role model. He was also a fierce persecutor
of Christianity, doubtless because he felt that the religion
threatened the values that had made Rome great.
Aurelius was not an original or brilliant thinker, but his
Meditations reflect well the stoic strain in Greco-Roman
civilization. The emphasis on morality combined with
emotional detachment is strongly reminiscent of
Buddhist thought, with which Stoicism has often been
compared. Some samples of his writings:
Constantly regard the universe as one living being,
having one substance and one soul; and observe how all
things have reference to one perception, the perception
of this one living being; and how all things act with one
movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes
of all things which exist; observe too the continuous
spinning of the thread and the structure of the web.
The best way of avenging yourself is not to become like
the wrongdoer.

You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus
used to say.
Live with the gods. And he does live with the gods who
constantly shows them that his own soul is satisfied with
that which is assigned to him, and that it does all that the
daemon wishes, which Zeus has given to every person as
his guardian and guide, as a portion of himself. And this
daemon is everyone's knowledge and reason.
To find an example in devotion to “Zeus’, the Supreme
Consciousness, we once again turn to ancient history.
This time our hero is Ashoka the Great of India.

CHAPTER III
THE DEVOTION OF ASHOKA THE GREAT
H.G. Wells wrote: "In the history of the world there have
been thousands of kings and emperors who call
themselves "their highnesses," "their majesties", and
"their exalted majesties" and so on. They shone for a
brief moment, and as quickly disappeared. But Ashoka
shines and shines brightly like a bright star, even unto
this day."
Ashoka was the first ruler to unify all of India. He was
also the first Buddhist King who after his conversion to
Buddhism attempted to embrace nonviolence and
Buddhist principles as part of royal policies Today, he is
considered one of India's greatest leaders. Ashoka the
Great ruled India from 273 BC until 232 BC.
Ashoka was born in 304 BC. He was the son of the
Mauryan Emperor Bindusara. He had one younger
brother and also older half-brothers. Early on, he showed
great promise. When he started showing success as a
military leader, his older brothers began to fear that
Ashoka would ascend to the throne.
When an uprising occurred in the Takshashila province,
Prince Susima suggested to his father that Ashoka would
be the best person to deal with it. When news reached
the province that Ashoka was coming, the fighting
stopped. The militia who had started the revolt
welcomed Ashoka's arrival.
With this victory, Susima became more concerned about
Ashoka. He portrayed him as power hungry and

ambitious. Soon, he had convinced his father to exile
Ashoka to Kalinga.
In Kalinga, Ashoka fell in love with Kaurwaki who
worked as a fisherwoman. She would later be one of his
many wives.
His exile was soon ended when there was an uprising in
Ujjain Province. Emperor Bindusara now called Ashoka
back from exile and sent him to Ujjain. This time there
was a great battle and Ashoka was seriously hurt.
During his recovery, he was overseen by Buddhist
monks and nuns. It was during this time that he first
learned about Buddhism. He fell in love with his nurse
Devi. She too would become one of his wives.
The year after the battle at Ujjain, the Emperor
Bindusara became very sick. It was clear that he would
die. Soon, a war broke out between all of his sons over
who would succeed the emperor.
After a series of battles, Ashoka killed many of his
brothers. He thus attained the throne in 274 BC. For the
first eights years of his rule, he became famous for his
brutaiity and his desire to expand the Mauryan Empire.
His nickname at this time was Chandashoka which
means "cruel Ashoka"
So, when Ashoka was in his eighth year of rule, his wife
Devi gave birth two twins: Prince Mahindra and Princess
Sanghamitra.
He also learned that one of his brothers was hiding in
Kalinga. Ashoka was outraged that any place would aid
his brother. He launched a full invasion of the province. In the fighting, thousands of people were killed and large
areas of land were ravaged.
After the battle, Ashoka decided to look over the
destruction. The place that he had once been exiled now
lay in utter collapse with houses burned down and many
bodies still unburied. It was said that this was the first
time that Ashoka saw the direct impact of war.
According to legend, upon seeing the utter devastation,
he said: "What have I done?" For the rest of his life, he
would not forget the horror that he saw on this day.
It is said that his wife Devi accompanied him at Kalinga.
She was so bothered by what she saw that she left his
side. She ran away and never returned.
Devi was Buddhist and perhaps this in combination with
Ashoka's memory of learning about Buddhist principles
led him to change his ways.
From this point on, he embraces Buddhism. He took on
the Buddhists Radhaswami and Manjushri as his
teachers. He decided that he would base the rest of his
rule on Buddhist principles.
Ashoka now reversed course. He set free all of his
prisoners and returned their property. At this time, he got
a new name. Instead of Chandashoka, he became known
as Dharmashoka which means "pious Ashoka."
Ashoka now begins a massive public works project
where he orders the creation of thousands of Buddhist
buildings. He builds stupas which are mounds that house
Buddhist relics and he builds viharas which are Buddhist
monasteries. He orders the construction of roadhouses
for travelers which are free of charge.

He created edicts which protect wildlife against sport
hunting and he promotes the vegetarianism. He initiates
the building of universities, irrigation systems, and
hospitals.
He signs peace treaties with many of the neighboring
kingdom even though with India's resources, he would
have little trouble to conquer them outright.
Ashoka takes the very innovative position of protecting
minority interests in India. He required nonviolence as
well as tolerance of all other religions and all opinions.
"Dharmashoka also defined the main principles of
dharma as nonviolence, tolerance of all sects and
opinions, obedience to parents and other religious
teachers and priests, liberality toward friends, humane
treatment of servants, and generosity towards all."
Ashoka ruled for over 40 years. 50 years after his death,
the Mauryan Empire came to an end. He had numerous
wives and many heirs but most of their names are lost.
Buddhism did not, of course, stay the state religion of
India. Still, empowered by Ashoka, Buddhism quickly
spread outside of India's borders into Southeast Asia.
Today, the Ashokra Chakra, the Wheel of Dharma, is
featured on the national flag of India. Ashoka used this
image on many of his constructions. The wheel has 24
spokes which represent:
1. Love
2. Courage
3. Patience
4. Peacefulness
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5. Kindness
6. Goodness
7. Faithfulness
8. Gentleness
9. Self-control
10. Selflessness
11. Self sacrifice
12. Truthfulness
13. Righteousness
14. Justice
15. Mercy
16. Graciousness
17. Humility
18. Empathy
19. Sympathy
20. Godly knowledge
21. Godly wisdom
22. Godly moral
23. Reverential fear of God
24. Hope/trust/faith in the goodness of God

 CHAPTER IV

MAN AND THE BATTLE OF LIFE
The gospel of universal peace and goodwill among
men—for without a universal and entire mutual goodwill
there can be no real and abiding peace— has never
succeeded for a moment in possessing itself of
human life during the historic cycle of our progress,
because morally, socially, spiritually the race was not
prepared and the poise of Nature in its evolution would
not admit of its being immediately prepared for any such
transcendence. Even now we have not actually
progressed beyond the feasibility of a system
of accommodation between conflicting interests which
may minimize the recurrence of the worst forms of strife.
And towards this consummation the method, the
approach which humanity has been forced by its own
nature to adopt, is a monstrous mutual massacre
unparalleled in history; a universal war, full
of bitterness and irreconcilable hatred, is the straight
way and the triumphant means modern man has found
for the establishment of universal peace! This is what
Aurobindo had written almost a century back. Sadly, it is
still true in Twenty-first century;
But Aurobindo also saw a ray of hope in future when he
went on to say: A day may come, must surely come, we
will say, when humanity will be ready spiritually,
morally, socially for the reign of universal
peace; meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and
function of man as a fighter have to be accepted and
accounted for by any practical philosophy and religion.

Some civilizations made it its chief aim to minimize the
incidence and disaster of war. For this purpose they
limited the military obligation to the small class who by
their birth, nature and traditions were marked out for this
function and found in it their natural means of selfdevelopment
through the flowering of the soul in the
qualities of courage, disciplined force, strong
helpfulness and chivalrous nobility for which the
warrior’s life pursued under the stress of a high ideal
gives a field and opportunities. The rest of the
community was in every way guarded from slaughter
and outrage; their life and occupations were as little
interfered with as possible and the combative and
destructive tendencies of human nature were given a
restricted field, confined in a sort of lists so as to do the
minimum amount of harm to the general life of the race,
while at the same time by being subjected to high
ethical ideals and every possible rule of humanity and
chivalry the function of war was obliged to help in
ennobling and elevating instead of brutalizing those
who performed it.
There is no greater example of this type of war in the
History than the battle of Thermopylae which took place
a mere 40 KM away from Adelphi, which you may
recall, you and I visited in 2002.
In the 5th century BC, the Persian empire fought the
city-states of Greece in one of the most profoundly
symbolic struggles in history. The long path to battle at
Thermopylae began in what is now Iran, heart of the
once vast Persian Empire. Persian expansion had begun
in the mid-6th century, when its first shah, or great king,
Cyrus, had led a revolt against the dominant Medes. By
545 BC, Cyrus had extended Persian hegemony to the
coast of Asia Minor. It was inevitable, then, that there
would be tension between the Greek and Persian ways of
life, and in 499 bc several Greek cities in Asia Minor
revolted against the Persian King Darius.
The first Persian War ended badly for Darius, however,
when his troops were defeated by a smaller Athenian
army at Marathon in 490 BC. Greece was saved — but
only for a while.
Darius' son Xerxes does not seem to have been
especially driven to complete his late father's unfinished
business. He waffled over whether the long-delayed
punishment of Athens merited such a far-flung
campaign. At last a phantom allegedly appeared in his
dreams, urging him to invade Greece — this being
interpreted by his magi as a portent for world conquest.
Xerxes spent more than four years gathering soldiers and
stockpiling supplies from every corner of his empire.
Together, they formed an army that the Greek historian
Herodotus estimated at 1.7 million, excluding the navy.
When he added ship-borne fighters and European allies
to the total, he came to a sum of 2.6 million; a figure that
he reckoned would have to be doubled to account for
servants, crews and camp followers.
Within Xerxes' army, the native Persian contingent was
most privileged. Carriages full of women and servants
accompanied the Persians on the march. One Persian
unit was particularly esteemed: a crack fighting force
that Herodotus called the Immortals, alleging that any
dead, wounded or sick soldier in its ranks was replaced
so swiftly that its 10,000-man strength never seemed to
diminish.

Watching his own army pass in review, Xerxes himself
is said to have wept as he reflected on the brevity of
human life. Not one of them, he observed, would be
alive in 100 years' time. It was an unlikely moment of
insight for a king who had once ordered one of his own
soldiers split in two.
The Persians maintained a splendid marching order. At
the front was more than half the army, succeeded by a
gap to keep those ordinary troops from being in contact
with the king. There followed 1,000 of Persia's finest
horsemen, another 1,000 picked spearmen, carrying their
spears upside down, 10 sacred horses, a holy chariot
drawn by eight horses, then Xerxes' chariot. The king
was then followed by 1,000 noble Persian spearmen with
their spears pointed upward, another 1,000 picked
cavalry, 10,000 infantry, many with gold or silver
ornaments on their spears, and finally 10,000 more
horsemen before another gap that separated those fine
troops from the ordinary soldiers who brought up the
rear.
It is entirely possible that Xerxes did not anticipate
having to fight any significant battles in Greece. The
magnitude of his force was so great that he must have
anticipated only demanding surrender in order to receive
it. Like his father before him, he sent messengers ahead
demanding the traditional tokens of submission — earth
and water. Many Greek towns relented in the face of
certain destruction. To the Persian king, they conceded,
belonged the land and the sea.
Two cities were spared the indignity of the Persian
ultimatum. Xerxes well recalled the fate of the
messengers his father had sent to Athens and Sparta. The
Athenians had thrown them into a pit. In Sparta the
Persian diplomats were shown the place to find the earth
and water they sought — by being pushed down a well.
Xerxes was familiar with the willful Athenians who had
thwarted his father at Marathon 10 years earlier, but
along the march he slowly became acquainted with
Greece's other most powerful city-state. At one point he
asked a Spartan exile if anyone in Greece would dare
resist his force. The exile, for whom there was no love
lost for the city that had expelled him, admitted that no
length of odds could possibly convince the Spartans to
submit. The Spartans, he said, feared only the law, and
their law forbade them to retreat in battle. It commanded
them to stand firm always and to conquer or die.
Knowing that they could not hope to defeat the Persians
as individual cities, the Greeks convened a conference in
order to coordinate a Pan-Hellenic defense. It was there
that the Spartans, whose own city was unique in that it
had no walls (relying instead upon the bravery of its
citizens for defense), advocated the construction of a
wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, thereby protecting
only the southernmost part of Greece. The cities north of
Corinth, however, knowing that Xerxes could swing
around the Aegean and strike Greece from the north,
sought an earlier defense. The congress adopted their
strategy. The Greeks elected to draw the line at
Thermopylae.
To the Greek strategists in 481 BC, Thermopylae
represented their best chance to stop or at least delay the
Persian army long enough to allow their combined fleets
to draw the Persian navy into a decisive sea battle. A
narrow mountain pass, Thermopylae was a bottleneck
through which the Persian army somehow had to
proceed. Forced to fight there, the Persians would be
unable to take advantage of their massive preponderance
in numbers; instead, they would have to face the Greeks
in close-quarter, hand-to-hand combat.
Two armies now prepared to converge on the tiny
mountain pass. For Xerxes no force, not even nature,
would be allowed to resist his progress. When a violent
storm tore up the first bridge his engineers had built
across the Hellespont, the great king ordered his
engineers put to death, and he had his men whip and
curse the waters for defying him. New engineers then
bridged the Hellespont again. Constructed from nearly
700 galleys and triremes lashed together, the bridge was
a marvel of makeshift military engineering. Flax and
papyrus cables held the boats in line, and sides were
constructed to keep animals from seeing the water and
panicking during their crossing. The Persian army
advanced inexorably into Greece.
The Greek force that now raced to Thermopylae was
ridiculously small for the challenge that awaited it: 300
Spartans, 80 Myceneans, 500 Tegeans, 700 Thespians
and so forth, totaling about 4,900. The countrymen they
left behind seem to have put little faith in this army. The
Athenians voted to evacuate their city. Their men of
military age embarked on ships, while women and
children were sent to the safer territory of the
Peloponnesus. Only treasurers and priestesses remained
behind, charged with guarding the property of the gods
on the Acropolis.
If any Greek understood the danger of his assignment, it
was almost certainly the Spartan commander, Leonidas.
Although each city's contingent had its own leader,
Leonidas had been placed in overall command of the
Greek army. One of two Spartan kings — Sparta had no
kingship in any real sense — Leonidas traced his
ancestry back to the demigod Heracles. He had
handpicked the 300 warriors under his command; all
were middle-aged men with children to leave behind as
heirs. He had selected men to die, and done so
apparently without the philosophic reluctance of Xerxes.
Leonidas and the Spartans had been trained to do their
duty, and, having received an oracle that Sparta must
either lose a king or see the city destroyed, Leonidas was
convinced that his final duty was death.
On the way to Thermopylae, Leonidas sent his widely
admired Spartans ahead of the other troops to inspire
them with confidence. They arrived to find the pass
unoccupied. It was only 50 feet wide and far narrower at
some points. There were hot springs there — these gave
the pass its name — an altar to Heracles and the remains
of an old wall with gates that had fallen into ruin. The
Greeks now rushed to rebuild it.
As Xerxes' army drew closer, a Persian scout rode to
survey the Greek camp. What he saw astonished him —
the Spartans, many of them naked and exercising, the
rest calmly combing their hair. It was common practice
for the Spartans to fix their hair when they were about to
risk their lives, but neither the scout nor his king could
comprehend such apparent vanity.
The Greeks, too, began to receive intelligence on the size
of the Persian force. Sometime before the battle, the
Spartan Dieneces was told that when the Persian archers
let loose a volley, their arrows would hide the sun. To
Dieneces that was just as well. For if the Persians hide
the sun, he said, we shall fight in the shade. Despite the imperturbable courage of Dieneces and the other
Spartans, the Greeks were shaken when the Persian host
finally neared their position. At a council of war the
leaders debated retreat, until Leonidas' opinion
prevailed. The Spartan would do his duty. The Greeks
would stay put and try to hold off the Persians until
reinforcements could arrive.
The Persian army encamped on the flat grounds of the
town of Trachis, only a short distance from
Thermopylae. There, Xerxes stopped his troops for four
days, waiting upon the inevitable flight of the overawed
Greeks. By the fifth day, August 17, 480 bc, the great
king could no longer control his temper. The impudent
Greeks were, like the storm at the Hellespont, defying
his will. He now sent forward his first wave of troops —
Medes and Cissians — with orders to take the Greeks
alive
The Medes and Cissians were repulsed with heavy
casualties. Determined to punish the resisters, Xerxes
sent in his Immortals. The crack Persian troops advanced
confidently, envisioning an easy victory, but they had no
more success than the Medes.
What Xerxes had not anticipated was that the Greeks
held the tactical advantage at Thermopylae. The tight
battlefield nullified the Persians' numerical
preponderance, and it also prevented them from fighting
the way they had been trained. Persian boys, it was said,
were taught only three things: to ride, to tell the truth and
to use the bow. There was no place for cavalry at
Thermopylae and, even more critical, no place to volley
arrows. The Greeks had positioned themselves behind
the rebuilt wall. They would have to be rooted out the
hard way.

The Persian army was neither trained nor equipped for
such close fighting. Its preferred tactic was to volley
arrows from a distance, the archers firing from behind
the protection of wicker shields planted in the ground.
They wore very little armor and carried only daggers and
short spears for hand-to-hand combat.
Although students of military history argue that true
shock warfare has seldom been practiced — since it is
antithetical to the soldier's natural desire for selfpreservation
— the Greeks had made it their standard
tactic. Greek soldiers perhaps drew some confidence
from their heavy armor and their long spears, which
could outreach the Persian swords. But the Greeks also
had another, more intangible, edge: something to fight
for. They were defending their homes, and they were
doing their duty — they were not fighting as slaves of
some half mad god-king. As heavy casualties sapped
their soldiers' resolve, the Persian commanders had to
resort to lashing them with whips in order to drive them
against the determined Greek defenders.
During that long first day of fighting, the Spartans led
the Greek resistance. Experienced Spartan warriors
would come out from behind the walls, do fierce battle
with the Persians, then feign retreat in order to draw the
Persians into a trap. Xerxes reportedly leapt to his feet
three times in fear for his army.
The second day of Thermopylae followed much the
same course as the first. The various Greek contingents
now took turns fending off the attacks, but the Persians
failed to make any headway.
It is difficult to say how long the Greeks could have held
off the Persians at Thermopylae — their casualties thus
far were comparatively light — but the question was
soon made moot. When the Greeks had first arrived,
they learned that the presumably impregnable site
possessed a hidden weakness: There was a track through
the mountains that could be used by an enemy force to
surround and annihilate the defenders of the gate.
Recognizing the danger, Leonidas had dispatched his
Phocian contingent to guard the path. Thus the already
small number of troops available at the gate was made
smaller still by the division of the Greek forces. The
Phocians themselves were charged with the difficult task
of defending a route with no natural defenses. Their best
hope — Greece's best hope — lay in the mountain track
remaining unknown to the Persians.
It was, in the end, a Greek who betrayed that secret. The
traitor, Ephialtes, was apparently motivated by greed
when he revealed the mountain path to Xerxes. Acting
immediately on the new information, the king sent
Persian troops up the path during the night, when
darkness concealed their movement among the oak trees.
Near the top, they completely surprised the luckless
Phocians. At last free to fight in their usual fashion, the
Persians rained down arrows as the Phocians frantically
sought to gather their arms. In desperation, the Phocians
raced to higher ground for a last stand. The Persians,
however, had no interest in chasing the Phocians higher
but instead turned down the trail, aiming for the pass at
Thermopylae.
Lookouts raced down the hill to warn Leonidas of the
descending Persian army. There was little time left. A
quick council of war led to the decision to split up the
Greek force. There was no reason for the entire army to
be annihilated at the wall. Most contingents were now
allowed to return home and prepare for a later
showdown. Leonidas and his Spartans, however, would
remain at Thermopylae. Standing by them were the loyal
Thespians, who considered it an honor to die fighting
beside the Spartans. Leonidas also kept as hostages some
400 Thebans whom he suspected of having Persian
sympathies.
It is in many ways the irony of Thermopylae that Sparta,
arguably the least free of all the Greek states, now stood
as the final defender of Greek freedom. All the things
that would make Greece great — science, art, poetry,
drama, philosophy — were foreign to Sparta. The
Spartans had developed a constitution of almost total
subordination of the individual to the community.
Spartan elders determined which infants could live or
die. Spartan boys were sent into military training at the
age of 7. Spartan men lived in barracks, away from their
wives, for much of their adult lives. The Spartans ate at a
common table, they distributed land equally in an almost
communistic fashion and they were forbidden to engage
in what were deemed the superfluous arts. Such
freedoms as their warrior elite enjoyed did not extend to
non-Spartans living in their territory, the Helots, who
served as their slaves. Yet the Spartan elite believed
passionately in their freedom, and their sense of duty,
imbued at an early age, guaranteed that no Spartan
commander would ever have to resort to whips to drive
his soldiers into battle.
On August 19, the Greeks elected to inflict as much
damage as possible on the Persian army. Knowing that
this day's struggle would be their last, they pressed
stolidly forward, leaving behind the safety of the wall to
fight in the widest part of the pass. There, they would
battle the massive Persian army on open ground. They
would do so, however, without the Thebans, who as
Leonidas had expected surrendered to the Persians
before the final assault began.
Xerxes ordered his men in for the kill. Once again his
commanders lashed their own troops to drive them
forward. Many Persians were trampled to death by their
own comrades. Others, shoved aside, drowned in the sea.
All the while, the Spartans and Thespians did their
deadly work. No one, wrote Herodotus, could count the
number of the dead.
The Greeks fought with their long spears until the shafts
had all broken. Then they fought with swords. In the
course of the struggle, Leonidas fulfilled the prophecy
that had doomed him. Four times the Greeks then drove
the enemy away from his body before the Persians
finally succeeded in dragging it away. It was about then
that the second Persian force arrived from the mountain
pass.
Now completely surrounded, the exhausted Greeks
withdrew for the last time behind the wall and formed
themselves into a single compact body. Here, wrote
Herodotus, they resisted to the last, with their swords, if
they had them, and, if not, with their hands and teeth,
until the Persians, coming on from the front over the
ruins of the wall and closing in from behind, finally
overwhelmed them.
The Battle of Thermopylae was over. Leonidas and his
300 Spartans all lay dead, as did the 700 Thespians who
had stood by them. The Persian dead were said to
number around 20,000.
It is the creed of the Aryan fighter. “Know God,” it
says, “know thyself, help man; protect the Right, do
without fear or weakness or faltering thy work of
battle in the world. Thou art the eternal and
imperishable Spirit, thy soul is here on its upward
path to immortality; life and death are nothing,
sorrow and wounds and suffering are nothing, for
these things have to be conquered and overcome.
Destroy when by destruction the world must
advance, but hate not that which thou
destroyest, neither grieve for all those who perish.
Know everywhere the one self, know all to be
immortal souls and the body to be but dust. Do thy
work with calm, strong and equal spirit; fight
and fall nobly or conquer mightily. For this is the
work that “God and thy nature have given to thee to
accomplish.” And Spartans indeed did the work of
God well.

          CHAPTER V

REJECTION OF EGOISM BY PERICLES
Aurobindo says: Renunciation is indispensable, but the
true renunciation is the inner rejection of desire and
egoism; without that the outer physical abandoning of
works is a thing unreal and ineffective. Knowledge is
essential, there is no higher force for liberation, but
works with knowledge are also needed; by the union of
knowledge and works the soul dwells entirely in the
Divine status not only in repose and inactive calm, but
in the very midst and stress and violence of action.
Devotion is all-important, but works with devotion
are also important; by the union of knowledge, devotion
and works the soul is taken up into the highest status of
the Supreme Being.
These are all the qualities that combined in Pericles to
usher in the Golden Age of Athens in fifth century BC.
Pericles rejected temptation to retaliate upon Sparta,
instead, devoted his energies to the beautification of
Athens. Pericles rejected temptation to retaliate upon
Sparta, and instead, devoted his energies to the
beautification of Athens. “It was his desire and design,”
says Plutarch, “that the undisciplined mechanic
multitude . . . should not go without their share of public
funds, and yet should not have these given them for
sitting still and doing nothing; and to this end he brought
in these vast projects of construction.”
A golden age started; the city became rich and prospered
under the wise leadership of Pericles, who governed, by
the free choice of its citizens, for about thirty years until
his fall in 430 BC and yet should not have these given
them for sitting still and doing nothing; and to this end
he brought in these vast projects of construction.”
They could not help seeing that Pericles was working,
not for his own glory, but for that of his city; and he was
so reasonable and could state his reasons so clearly, that
the people fell in with whatever he proposed. He had
more power than any king ever possessed; but this was
not because the people were afraid of him, but because
he was so skillful in war, so wise in peace, and, above
all, so thoroughly unselfish. Of course he had enemies,
but the greater part of the Athenians looked upon him as
the ideal Greek.
Pericles was not only a good soldier and statesman, but
he was a lover of what was beautiful. All the Greeks,
indeed, loved beauty; they loved it as people love fresh
air and sunshine. To have ugly things around them made
them uncomfortable; they felt stifled and gloomy.
Pericles planned to cover the Acropolis with a group of
temples that should be the masterpieces of Grecian
architecture. The noblest of them all was the Parthenon,
a magnificent structure of the purest white marble,
sacred to Athene.
The age of Pericles, or that part of it during which
Greece was at the height of her glory, is counted as
lasting only from 445 B.C. to 431B.C. because, although
it had been agreed that the treaty should last for thirty
years, it was only fifteen before it was broken. During
those fifteen years there was peace in the land of the
Greeks, in Persia, Spain, Italy, Gaul, in all the countries
that were then known. The one exception was the revolt
of two members of the Delian League, Byzantium and Samos; but Pericles succeeded in crushing these
rebellions. Those fifteen years were the proudest time in
the history of Athens. The city was rich and strong and
beautiful and happy.
Pericles brought it about that all who held office or
worked for the state should be paid. Among these were
several thousand jurors. Pericles planned a wonderful
group of buildings and statues on the Acropolis. The
noblest was the Parthenon.
Phidias made statues of the gods like human beings, but
more grand and majestic. Pericles also built the Odeum,
and adorned the theatre of Dionysus. Tragedies made the
people wish to honor the gods and be brave and
patriotic. Comedies made them think about public
events. The state paid the admittance fees that all might
see the plays.
Æschylus took the state prize for the best play thirteen
times; then it fell to Sophocles. A third tragic poet was
Euripides. Aristophanes was the greatest writer of
comedy. Herodotus and Thucydides were famous
historians.
Athens was now rich and prosperous. Much money
came to her from the Delian League. The Athenians
lived in simple houses and wore simple clothes. They
had a variety of food. Honey took the place of sugar.
Children played many of the games of to-day. They were
carefully trained. The little girl was taught by her
mother; the boy went to school.
The Age of Pericles lasted from 445 B.C. to 431 B.C. It
was the proudest time in the history of Athens.

Pericles proved that the real source of knowledge is the
Lord in the heart; “I am seated in the heart of every man
and from me is knowledge,” says the Gita. Take all the
Scriptures that are or have been, Bible and Koran and the
books of the Chinese, Veda and Upanishads and
Purana and Tantra and Shastra and the Gita itself and the
sayings of thinkers and sages, prophets and Avatars, still
you shall not say that there is nothing else or that the
truth your intellect cannot find there is not true because
you cannot find it there. That is the limited thought of
the sectarian or the composite thought of the eclectic
religionist, not the untrammeled truth-seeking of the free
and illumined mind and God-experienced soul. Heard or
unheard before, that always is the truth which is seen by
the heart of man in its illumined depths or heard within
from the Master of all knowledge.

CHAPTER VI

PERMENIDES' PSYCHOLOGICAL IDEALISM
“Supreme, they say,” beyond their objects “are the
senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supreme over
the mind the intelligent will: that which is supreme
over the intelligent will, is he,”—is the conscious self.
Therefore, says the Gita this supreme cause of our
subjective life which we have to understand and
become aware of by the intelligence; in that we have to
fix our will.
The first movement must be obviously to get rid of
desire which is the whole root of the evil and suffering;
and in order to get rid of desire, we must put an end to
the cause of desire, the rushing out of the senses to seize
and enjoy their objects. We must draw them back
when they are inclined thus to rush out; draw them away
from their objects,—as the tortoise draws in his limbs
into the shell.
If this is done, then it becomes possible to move among
the objects of sense, in contact with them, acting on
them, but with the senses entirely under the control of
the subjective self, — not at the mercy of the objects
and their contacts and reactions,— and that self again
obedient to the highest self. Then, free from reactions,
the senses will be delivered from the affections of liking
and disliking, escape the duality of positive and
negative desire, and calm, peace, clearness, happy
tranquility will settle upon the man.
Parmenides of Elea, early 5th century BC, was
an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city
on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of
the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work
of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived
only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides
describes two views of reality. In "the way of truth" (a
part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as
"what-is") is one, change is impossible, and existence is
timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In "the
way of opinion," he explains the world of appearances,
in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions
which are false and deceitful. This fits in well with the
ideas of Gita – if the world of appearances is not allowed
to touch the inner life – tranquility will settle upon man.
Of his life in Elea, it was said that he had written
the laws of the city. His most important pupil was Zeno,
who according to Plato, was twenty-five years his junior,
and was his eromenos. Parmenides had a large influence
on Plato, who not only named a dialogue, Parmenides,
after him, but always spoke of him with veneration.
Parmenides attempted to distinguish between the unity
of nature and its variety, insisting in the Way of
Truth upon the reality of its unity, which is therefore the
object of knowledge, and upon the unreality of its
variety, which is therefore the object, not of knowledge,
but of opinion. In the Way of Opinion he propounded a
theory of the world of seeming and its development,
pointing out however that, in accordance with the
principles already laid down, these cosmological
speculations do not pretend to anything more than mere
appearance.
The section known as "the way of truth" discusses that
which is real, which contrasts in some way with the
argument of the section called "the way of opinion,"
which discusses that which is illusory. Under the "way of truth," Parmenides stated that there are two ways of
inquiry: that it is, that it is not. He said that the latter
argument is never feasible because nothing can not be:
Parmenides claimed that the truth cannot be known
through sensory perception. Only Logos will result in
the understanding of the truth of the world. This is
because the perception of things or appearances is
deceptive. Genesis-and-destruction, as Parmenides
emphasizes, is illusory, because the underlying material
of which a thing is made will still exist after its
destruction. What exists must always exist. And we
arrive at the knowledge of this underlying, static, and
eternal reality through reasoning, not through senseperception.
Parmenides made the ontological argument against
nothingness, essentially denying the possible existence of
a void. According to Aristotle, this led Leucippus to
propose the atomic theory, which supposes that
everything in the universe is either atoms or voids,
specifically to contradict Parmenides'
argument. Aristotle himself, proclaimed, in opposition to
Leucippus, the dictum horror vacui or "nature abhors a
vacuum". Aristotle reasoned that in a complete vacuum,
motion would encounter no resistance, and thus infinite
speed would be possible, something which Aristotle
would not accept.
A shadow of Parmenides' ideas can be seen in the
physical concept of Block time, which considers
existence to consist of past, present, and future, and the
flow of time to be illusory. In his critique of this
idea, Karl Popper called Einstein "Parmenides"
This concept of illusion underlines futility of desires and
their fulfillment. Happy is the person who goes through
existence unattached to the events though carrying out
his allotted tasks.

CHAPTER VII

THE PRINCIPLE OF DIVINE WORKS
MAKES CICERO FATHER OF HIS
COUNTRY
Aurobindo says see God, the Divine, as the goal,
superior to action yet its inner spiritual cause and object
and original will, and the world with all its activities is
conquered and possessed in a divine transcendence of
the world. It can become instead of a prison-house an
opulent kingdom, which we have conquered for the
spiritual life by slaying the limitation of the tyrant ego
and overcoming the bondage of our gaoler desires and
breaking the prison of our individualistic possession and
enjoyment. Whatsoever the Best doeth, that the lower
kind of man puts into practice; the standard he creates,
the people follows.
The rule given here by the Gita is the rule for the master
man, the superman, the divinized human being, the
Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean, any one-sided
and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollonian or Dionysian,
any angelic or demoniac super manhood, but in that of
the man whose whole personality has been offered up
into the being, nature and consciousness of the one
transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss of the
smaller self has found its greater self, has been
divinized.
The senses, mind and intellect are the seat of this eternal
cause of imperfection and yet it is within this sense,
mind and intellect, this play of the lower nature that you
would limit your search for perfection! The effort is
vain. The kinetic side of your nature must first seek to
add to itself the quietistic; you must uplift yourself
beyond this lower nature to that which is above the three
gunas, that which is founded in the highest principle, in
the soul. Only when you have attained to peace of soul,
can you become capable of a free and divine action.
A strong one-sided truth, when set forth as the
whole truth, creates a strong light but also a strong
confusion; for the very strength of its element of truth
increases the strength of its element of error. The
divinized man entering into his divine nature will act
even as he acts; he will not give himself up to inaction.
The Divine is at work in man in the ignorance and at
work in man in the knowledge. To know Him is our
soul’s highest welfare and the condition of its perfection,
but to know and realize Him as a transcendent peace
and silence is not all; the secret that has to be learned is
at once the secret of the eternal and unborn Divine and
the secret of the divine birth and works. The action
which proceeds from that knowledge, will be free from
all bondage; “he who so knoweth me,” says the Teacher,
“is not bound by works.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero was born on January 3, 106 BC
and was murdered on December 7, 43 BC. His life
coincided with the decline and fall of the Roman
Republic, and he was an important actor in many of the
significant political events of his time (and his writings
are now a valuable source of information to us about
those events). He was, among other things, an orator,
lawyer, politician, and philosopher. Making sense of his
writings and understanding his philosophy requires us to
keep that in mind. He placed politics above
philosophical study; the latter was valuable in its own
right but was even more valuable as the means to more
effective political action.

Some of his writings and his greatest action in life betray
what Gita teaches. Let us first glance at his philosophy:
Stoicism as Cicero understood it held that the gods
existed and loved human beings. Both during and after a
person’s life, the gods rewarded or punished human
beings according to their conduct in life. The gods had
also provided human beings with the gift of reason.
Since humans have this in common with the gods, but
animals share our love of pleasure, the Stoics argued, as
Socrates had, that the best, most virtuous, and most
divine life was one lived according to reason, not
according to the search for pleasure.
On Duties. Written in the form of a letter to his son
Marcus, then in his late teens and studying philosophy in
Athens (though, we can gather from the letters, not
studying it all that seriously), but intended from the start
to reach a wider audience. Cicero addresses the topic of
duty (including both the final purpose of life, which
defines our duties, and the way in which duties should
be performed), and says that he will follow the Stoics in
this area, but only as his judgment requires. More
explicitly, the letter discusses how to determine what is
honorable, and which of two honorable things is more
honorable; how to determine what is expedient and how
to judge between two expedient things; and what to do
when the honorable and the expedient seem to conflict.
Cicero asserts that they can only seem to conflict; in
reality they never do, and if they seem to it simply shows
that we do not understand the situation properly. The
honorable action is the expedient and vice-versa. The
bonds among all human beings are described, and young
Marcus is urged to follow nature and wisdom, along
with whatever political activity might still be possible,
rather than seeking pleasure and indolence. On Duties,
written at the end of Cicero’s life, in his own name, for
the use of his son, pulls together a wide range of
material, and is probably the best starting place for
someone wanting to get acquainted with Cicero’s
philosophic works.
There is one incident in Cicero’s career that has always
attracted more debate than any other: his suppression of
the so-called Catilinarian Conspiracy during his
Consulship in 63 BC. For Cicero, this was his finest
hour. In later life, he rarely missed an opportunity to
remind the Roman people that in 63 he had singlehandedly
saved the state from destruction. And he
attempted to immortalize his achievement in a threevolume
epic poem, entitled On the Consulship. Only
fragments of this survive, and it is now most famous for
a line often regarded as one of the worst pieces of Latin
doggerel to have made it through the Dark Ages (‘O
fortunatam natam me consule Romam’ – a jingle with
something of the ring of ‘Rome was born a lucky city,
when I as Consul’).
Lucius Sergius Catilina was a young aristocrat, and –
like many of his peers – he was deeply in debt, as well as
frustrated by failure to win election to the political
offices he thought his due. Through various underground
sources Cicero learned by the late summer of 63 that
Catiline was plotting a revolutionary uprising that was to
involve burning the city down and – the real horror for
Roman conservatives – cancelling all debts. As Consul,
he put this information before the Senate, which declared
a state of emergency. At the beginning of November,
armed with further horrifying details and fresh, so he
claimed, from a failed assassination attempt, Cicero
denounced Catiline in the Senate and effectively drove him out of the city to his supporters in Etruria. A legion
was dispatched to deal with them – Catiline died in
battle early the next year; the remaining conspirators in
Rome were rounded up and, after a heated discussion in
the Senate, were put to death without trial under an
emergency powers decree. In triumph, Cicero shouted
just one famous word to the crowds waiting in the
Roman Forum: ‘vixere’ (‘they have lived’ – i.e. ‘they’re
dead’).
He was cheered along streets brightly lit by lamps and
torches in doorways and on roofs. The Senate had
conferred on him the title “father of His Country”, and
when Cato repeated the compliment outside, doubtless at
the top of his voice, everyone applauded. It was the
proudest moment in the life of Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Here he was, centre stage in his chosen area, the Forum,
the hero of the hour and the first man in Rome.
Cicero had averted a danger to the state. He had acted
with intelligence, patience and firmness.
By writing books, Cicero believed he could still
influence the course of events in Rome. On the State was
an immediate success with the reading public. It contains
some of Cicero’s most majestic prose. In the sixth book
Scipio recalls a dream in which he met the shade of the
long-dead Africunus. A virtuous life, Africunus told
him, “ is the highway to heaven, to that assembly of all those
who have ended their terrestrial lives and been freed from
the flesh. They live in that place over there which you now
see” (it was the round of light that blazed brightest of all
the fires in the sky), “which you mortals, borrowing a
Greek term, call the Milky Circle.” When I looked all
around me from that point, everything else appeared
extraordinarily beautiful. These were stars invisible from
earth, all larger than we have ever conceived. The smallest
was the most distant and the one closest to the earth shone
with a reflected light. The starry orbs were much larger
than the earth. In fact, the earth itself seemed so small that
I felt scornful of our empire, which is only kind of a dot…
Beneath the moon there is nothing that is not mortal and
not doomed to decay, except for the souls which, by the
grace of gods, have been conferred on humankind. But
above the moon everything is eternal.
The book’s sequel, On Law is a dialogue inspired by
Plato, set in the countryside on Cicero’s estate at
Arpinum, and the speakers are Quintus, Atticus and the
author. Cicero argues that law is inherent in the
workings of the universe. Human law is merely a
version, and an imperfect one at that, of the wisdom of
the natural order. “Law is the highest reason,” he says,
“implanted in nature, which commands what ought to be
done and forbids the opposite. This reason when firmly
fixed and fully developed in the human mind, is Law.
And so . . . Law is intelligence whose natural function it
is to command right conduct and forbid wrongdoing.’
Later he summarizes: “Virtue is reason completely
developed.”
In the book Cicero emphasizes the moral force of
oratory. An important means of fostering virtue is
through the art of explanation and persuasion – the
“science of distinguishing the true from the false and the
art of understanding the consequences and opposites of
every statement.” The mind “must employ not merely
the customary subtle method of debate but also the more
copious continuous style, considering, for example, how
to rule nations, establish laws, punish the wicked, protect
the good, honour those excel and publish to fellow
citizens precepts conducive to their well-being and
credit, so designed as to win their acceptance.” “The
most foolish notion of all is the belief that everything is
just which is found in the customs or laws of nations.”
Cicero’s compendium of classical thought had a huge
influence on the continuing development of western
philosophy. The seeker after truth traveled hopefully but
would never arrive. Cicero gave a hint of reincarnation,
borrowed from the current revival of interest in the
mystical ideas of the Greek sage Pythagoras. The purer a
man’s soul, the greater the possibility that it would
escape the impending cycle of future lives.
Cicero cites many instances of human behavior both
from the past and from his own time to illustrate how a
good life is to be lived. He mentions the deaths of Cato
and Pompey and hints at his feelings for Tulia (his
deceased daughter), while acknowledging that grief is
useless and should be put aside. His underlying purpose
is to show that right attitudes and a philosophical cast of
mind can alleviate misfortune and suffering. Death, he
argues, is not an evil, being either a change of place for
the soul or annihilation. Physical suffering is of no real
importance and can be borne with fortitude. Mental
suffering and distress, whether caused by mourning,
envy, compassion, vexation or despondency, are acts of
the will and can be eliminated by thoughtfulness,
courage and self-control. The same is said for excessive
delight, lust and fear. The way forward, Cicero wrote,
was to distance oneself from the cares and desires of life.
The whole life of philosopher, Plato said, is a preparation
for death. For what else do we do when we remove the soul
from pleasure – that is to say from body, from private
property (the body’s agent and servant), from the public
affairs and from every kind of private business: what, I
repeat, do we do except call the soul into its presence and
cancel its allegiance to the body? And is separating the
soul from the body anything else than learning how to die?
So let us, believe me, study to disassociate ourselves from
our bodies – that is, to acclimatize ourselves to the idea of
death. While we are still alive, this will be an imitation of
heavenly life; once we are free from our chains here, our
souls will run their race less slowly. For those who have
always been shackled to the flesh make slower progress
even when they are released. It is as if they have spent
many years in manacles. Once we have arrived at the other
place, and only then, shall we live. For this life is truly
death and I could, if I would, weep for it.
The discipline of the gladiator and the self-sacrifice of
the Indian widow who commits suttee and joins her
husband on the funeral pyre demonstrate that virtue can
transcend pain.
Cicero’s last major work, Duties, opens with a
discussion of the cardinal virtues – wisdom, justice,
fortitude and temperance – and goes on to set out the
specific duties that follow from adherence to them.
Cicero’s central concern is the contradiction between
virtue and the inevitable expediencies that divert human
agents from the path of right conduct. Giving many
examples from Roman history, he argues that often the
contradiction is only apparent, although sometimes it is
difficult to establish what is really right. The primary
duty, transcending all others, is the loyalty to state and
Cicero takes the opportunity to review the record of his
contemporaries. The behavior of various politicians of
his day – the avaricious Crassus and Caesar, who had
gone to the lengths of destroying the state – is compared
with this principle and found wanting.
Sometime towards the end of his life, Caesar remarked
that Cicero had won greater laurels than those won by a
general in his triumph, for it meant more to have
extended the frontiers of Roman genius than of its
empire.

CHAPTER VIII
EINSTEIN’S COSMOS REVEALS THE DIVINE
WORKER
To attain to the divine birth,—a divinizing new birth of
the soul into a higher consciousness,—and to do divine
works both as a means towards that before it is attained
and as an expression of it after it is attained, is then all
the Karmayoga of the Gita.
The Divine is the lord of his works; he is only
their channel through the instrumentality of his nature
conscious of and subject to her Lord. By the flaming
intensity and purity of this knowledge all his works are
burned up as in a fire and his mind remains without any
stain or disfiguring mark from them, calm, silent,
unperturbed, white and clean and pure. To do all in this
liberating knowledge, without the personal egoism of
the doer, is the first sign of the divine worker. The
second sign is freedom from desire; for where there
is not the personal egoism of the doer, desire becomes
impossible; it is starved out, sinks for want of a support,
dies of inanition. Outwardly the liberated man seems to
undertake works of all kinds like other men, on a larger
scale perhaps with a more powerful will and drivingforce,
for the might of the divine will works in his active
nature; but from all his inceptions and undertakings the
inferior concept and nether will of desire is
entirely banished.
The liberated man has no personal hopes; he does not
seize on things as his personal possessions; he receives
what the divine Will brings him, covets nothing, is
jealous of none: what comes to him he takes without
repulsion and without attachment; what goes from him
he allows to depart into the whirl of things
without repining or grief or sense of loss. His heart and
self are under perfect control; they are free from reaction
and passion, they make no turbulent response to the
touches of outward things. His action is indeed a purely
physical action, for all else comes from above, is not
generated on the human plane, is only a reflection of the
will, knowledge, joy of the divine Purushottama.
Therefore he does not by a stress on doing and its
objects bring about in his mind and heart any of those
reactions which we call passion and sin. For sin consists
not at all in the outward deed, but in an impure reaction
of the personal will, mind and heart which accompanies
it or causes it; the impersonal, the spiritual is always
pure.
The sign of the divine worker is that which is central to
the divine consciousness itself, a perfect inner joy and
peace which depend upon nothing in the world for its
source or its continuance; it is innate, it is the very stuff
of the soul’s consciousness, it is the very nature of
divine being.
The Yogis first “do works with the body, mind,
understanding, or even merely with the organs of action,
abandoning attachment, for self-purification. By
abandoning attachment to the fruits of works the soul in
union with Brahman attains to peace of rapt foundation
in Brahman, but the soul not in union is attached to the
fruit and bound by the action of desire.”
And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him
from acting. Only, he knows that it is not he, who is
active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple
gun. “The man who knows the principles of things
thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the inactive Impersonal),
‘I am doing nothing’; when he sees, hears, touches,
smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes,
ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is
only the senses acting upon the objects of the senses.”
The Divine motives, inspires, determines the entire
action; the human soul impersonal in the Brahman is the
pure and silent channel of his power; that power in the
Nature executes the divine movement. Such only are the
works of the liberated soul, for in nothing does he act
from a personal inception; such are the actions of the
accomplished Karmayogin. They rise from a free spirit
and disappear without modifying it, like waves that
rise and disappear on the surface of conscious,
immutable depths.
One such free spirit was born on March 14, 1879 in
Germany who would forever reshape our conception of
the universe. A journalist once asked this spirit, Albert
Einstein, the greatest scientist genius since Isaac
Newton, to explain his formula for success. The great
thinker thought for a second and then replied, “If A is
success, I should say the formula is A = X +Y + Z, X
being work and Y being play.”
And what is Z, asked the journalist?
“Keeping your mouth shut,” he replied.
What physicists, kings and queens, and the public found
endearing were his humanity, his generosity, and his wit,
whether he was championing the cause of world peace or
probing the mysteries of the universe.
One story Einstein liked to tell about his childhood was
of a "wonder" he saw when he was four or five years
old: a magnetic compass. The needle's invariable
northward swing, guided by an invisible force,
profoundly impressed the child. The compass convinced
him that there had to be "something behind things,
something deeply hidden."
To him "There was this huge world out there,
independent of us human beings and standing before us
like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to
our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that
world beckoned like a liberation."
"At the age of 12, I experienced a wonder in a booklet
dealing with Euclidean plane geometry, which came into
my hands at the beginning of a school year. Here were
assertions, as for example the intersection of the three
altitudes of a triangle in one point, which -- though by no
means evident -- could nevertheless be proved with such
certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the
question. This lucidity and certainty made an
indescribable impression on me."
Einstein grew familiar with the successes of past
scientists who had tried to explain the world entirely
through atoms or fluids, interacting like parts of a
machine.
"As a somewhat precocious young man, I was struck by
the futility of the hopes and the endeavors that most men
chase restlessly throughout life. And I soon realized the
cruelty of that chase, which in those days was more
carefully disguised with hypocrisy and glittering words
than it is today."
Einstein's began to attract respect with his published
papers (described in the next section), and in 1909 he
was appointed associate professor at the University of
Zurich. He was also invited to present his theories before
the annual convention of German scientists. He met
many people he had known only through their writings,
such as the physicist Max Planck of Berlin. Soon
Einstein was invited to the German University in Prague
as full professor. Here he met a visiting Austrian
physicist, Paul Ehrenfest. "Within a few hours we were
true friends," Einstein recalled, "as though our dreams
and aspirations were made for each other."
In 1914, the German government gave Einstein a senior
research appointment in Berlin, along with a
membership in the prestigious Prussian Academy of
Sciences. When Einstein had left his native land as a
youth, he had renounced German citizenship and all of
the militarist German society. But Berlin -- with no
teaching duties and a galaxy of top scientists for
colleagues -- could not be resisted. It was the highest
level a scientific career could ordinarily reach.
"I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to
fundamentals
and to turn aside from everything else, from the
multitude of things that clutter up the mind."
Einstein sent to the Annalen der Physik, the leading
German physics journal, a paper with a new
understanding of the structure of light. He argued that
light can act as though it consists of discrete,
independent particles of energy, in some ways like the
particles of a gas. A few years before, Max Planck's
work had contained the first suggestion of a discreteness
in energy, but Einstein went far beyond this. His
revolutionary proposal seemed to contradict the
universally accepted theory that light consists of
smoothly oscillating electromagnetic waves. But
Einstein showed that light quanta, as he called the
particles of energy, could help to explain phenomena
being studied by experimental physicists. For example,
he made clear how light ejects electrons from metals.
The Annalen der Physik received another paper from
Einstein. The well-known kinetic energy theory
explained heat as an effect of the ceaseless agitated
motion of atoms; Einstein proposed a way to put the
theory to a new and crucial experimental test. If tiny but
visible particles were suspended in a liquid, he said, the
irregular bombardment by the liquid's invisible atoms
should cause the suspended particles to carry out a
random jittering dance. Just such a random dance of
microscopic particles had long since been observed by
biologists (It was called "Brownian motion," an
unsolved mystery). Now Einstein had explained the
motion in detail. He had reinforced the kinetic theory,
and he had created a powerful new tool for studying the
movement of atoms.
Einstein sent the Annalen der Physik a paper on
electromagnetism and motion. Since the time of Galileo
and Newton, physicists had known that laboratory
measurements of mechanical processes could never
show any difference between an apparatus at rest and an
apparatus moving at constant speed in a straight line.
Objects behave the same way on a uniformly moving
ship as on a ship at the dock; this is called the Principle
of Relativity. But according to the electromagnetic
theory, developed by Maxwell and refined by Lorentz,
light should not obey this principle. Their
electromagnetic theory predicted that measurements on
the velocity of light would show the effects of motion.
Yet no such effect had been detected in any of the
ingenious and delicate experiments that physicists had
devised: the velocity of light did not vary.
Einstein had long been convinced that the Principle of
Relativity must apply to all phenomena, mechanical or
not. Now he found a way to show that this principle was
compatible with electromagnetic theory after all. As
Einstein later remarked, reconciling these seemingly
incompatible ideas required "only" a new and more
careful consideration of the concept of time. His new
theory, later called the special theory of relativity, was
based on a novel analysis of space and time -- an
analysis so clear and revealing that it can be understood
by beginning science students.
Einstein reported a remarkable consequence of his
special theory of relativity: if a body emits a certain
amount of energy, then the mass of that body must
decrease by a proportionate amount. Meanwhile he
wrote a friend, "The relativity principle in connection
with the Maxwell equations demands that the mass is a
direct measure for the energy contained in bodies; light
transfers mass... This thought is amusing and infectious,
but I cannot possibly know whether the good Lord does
not laugh at it and has led me up the garden path."
Einstein and many others were soon convinced of its
truth. The relationship is expressed as an
equation: E=mc²
"In light of knowledge attained, the happy achievement
seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent
student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the
years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense
longing, their alterations of confidence and exhaustion
and the final emergence into the light -- only those who
have experienced it can understand it."
Einstein's theories sprang from a ground of ideas
prepared by decades of experiments. One of the most
striking, in retrospect, was done in Cleveland, Ohio, by
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. Their
apparatus, shown above, was a massive stone block with
mirrors and crisscrossing light beams, giving an accurate
measurement of any change in the velocity of light.
Michelson and Morley expected to see their light beams
shifted by the swift motion of the earth in space. To their
surprise, they could not detect any change. It is debatable
whether Einstein paid heed to this particular experiment,
but his work provided an explanation of the unexpected
result through a new analysis of space and time.
Conversion of energy into mass.

The deep connection Einstein discovered between
energy and mass is expressed in the equation E=mc².
Here E represents energy, m represents mass, and c² is a
very large number, the square of the speed of light. Full
confirmation was slow in coming. In Paris in 1933, Irène
and Frédéric Joliot-Curie took a photograph showing the
conversion of energy into mass. A quantum of light,
invisible here carries energy up from beneath. In the
middle it changes into mass -- two freshly created
particles which curve away from each other.
Meanwhile in Cambridge, England, the reverse process
was seen: the conversion of mass into pure energy. With
their apparatus John Cockcroft and E.T.S. Walton broke
apart an atom. The fragments had slightly less mass in
total than the original atom, but they flew apart with
great energy.
As early as 1907, while Einstein and others explored the
implications of his special theory of relativity, he was
already thinking about a more general theory. The
special theory had shown how to relate the
measurements made in one laboratory to the
measurements made in another laboratory moving in a
uniform way with respect to the first laboratory. Could
he extend the theory to deal with laboratories moving in
arbitrary ways, speeding up, slowing down, changing
direction? Einstein saw a possible link between such
accelerated motion and the familiar force of gravity. He
was impressed by a fact known to Galileo and Newton
but not fully appreciated before Einstein puzzled over it.
All bodies, however different, if released from the same
height will fall with exactly the same constant
acceleration (in the absence of air resistance). Like the
invariant velocity of light on which Einstein had founded
his special theory of relativity, here was an invariance
that could be the starting point for a theory.
As he often did in his work, Einstein used a "thought
experiment." Suppose that a scientist is enclosed in a
large box somewhere, and that he releases a stone. The
scientist sees the stone fall to the floor of the box with a
constant acceleration. He might conclude that his box is
in a place where there is a force of gravity pulling
downward. But this might not be true. The entire box
could be free from gravity, but accelerating upward in
empty space on a rocket: the stone could be stationary
and the floor rising to meet it. The physicist in the box
cannot, Einstein noted, tell the difference between the
two cases. Therefore there must be some profound
connection between accelerated motion and the force of
gravity. It remained to work out this connection.
Einstein began to search for particular equations -- ones
that would relate the measurements made by two
observers who are moving in an arbitrary way with
respect to one another. The search was arduous, with
entire years spent in blind alleys. Einstein had to master
more elaborate mathematical techniques than he had
ever expected to need, and to work at a higher level of
abstraction than ever before. His friend Michele
Besso gave crucial help here. Meanwhile his life was
unsettled. He separated from his wife. And he began to
participate in politics after the First World War broke
out.
Success in his theoretical work was sealed in 1915. The
new equations of gravitation had an essential logical
simplicity, despite their unfamiliar mathematical form.
To describe the action of gravity, the equations showed
how the presence of matter warped the very framework
of space and time. This warping would determine how
an object moved. Einstein tested his theory by correctly
calculating a small discrepancy in the motion of the
planet Mercury, a discrepancy that astronomers had long
been at a loss to explain.
Einstein's new general theory of relativity predicted a
remarkable effect: when a ray of light passes near a
massive body, the ray should be bent. For example,
starlight passing near the sun should be slightly deflected
by gravity. This deflection could be measured when the
sun's own light was blocked during an eclipse. Einstein
predicted a specific amount of deflection, and the
prediction spurred British astronomers to try to observe a
total eclipse in May 1919. Feverish preparations began
as the war ended. Two expeditions, one to an island off
West Africa and the other to Brazil, succeeded in
photographing stars near the eclipsed sun. The starlight
had been deflected just as Einstein had predicted.
Announcement of the eclipse results caused a sensation,
and not only among scientists. It brought home to the
public a transformation of physics, by Einstein and
others, which was overturning established views of time,
space, matter, and energy. Einstein became the world's
symbol of the new physics. Some journalists took a
perverse delight in exaggerating the incomprehensibility
of his theory, claiming that only a genius could
understand it. More serious thinkers -- philosophers,
artists, ordinary educated and curious people -- took the
trouble to study the new concepts. These people too
chose Einstein as a symbol for thought at its highest.
The outbreak of the First World War brought Einstein's
pacifist sympathies into public view. Ninety-three
leading German intellectuals, including physicists such
as Planck, signed a manifesto defending Germany's war
conduct. Einstein and three others signed an antiwar
counter-manifesto. He helped to form a nonpartisan
coalition that fought for a just peace and for a
supranational organization to prevent future wars. As a
Swiss citizen Einstein could feel free to spend his time
on theoretical physics, but he kept looking for ways to
reconcile the opposing sides. "My pacifism is an
instinctive feeling," he said, "a feeling that possesses me
because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is
not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on
my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and
hatred."
With his scientific fame Einstein could act as unofficial
spokesman for the Weimar Republic, and he protested
the continued hostility of Germany's former enemies. In
1921 he refused to attend the third Solvay Congress in
Belgium, since all other German scientists were
excluded from it. In 1922 he joined a newly created
Committee on Intellectual Cooperation set up under the
League of Nations. The next year he resigned, distressed
by the League's impotence when confronted with
France's occupation of the German Ruhr. But he soon
returned to the committee. As a leading member of the
German League for Human Rights, he worked hard for
better relations with France. He also made numerous
gestures, without much success, against militarism.
Einstein attracted attention to a number of causes, such
as the release of political prisoners and the defense of
democracy against the spread of fascism. He spoke in
public, made statements to the press, signed petitions. In
1924 he defended the radical Bauhaus School of
Architecture; in 1927 he signed a protest against Italian
fascism; in 1929 he appealed for the commutation of
death sentences given to Arab rioters in British
Palestine.
Einstein traveled widely in the 1920s, both as a
spokesman for liberal causes and as an esteemed
member of the physics community. He visited England,
France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and South America
and traveled east as far as Japan, returning by way of
Palestine and Spain. In 1922 he went to Sweden to
accept a Nobel Prize in physics.
Anti-Semitism was openly pursued by the powerful
political right and the emerging Nazi party since 1919.
Nazi physicists and their followers violently denounced
Einstein's theory of relativity as "Jewish-Communist
physics." At times his friends feared for his safety. Such
anti-Semitism was one reason why Einstein, although he
believed in world government rather than nationalism,
gave public support to Zionism. "In so far as a particular
community is attacked as such," he said, "it is bound to
defend itself as such, so that its individual members may
be able to maintain their material and spiritual interests...
In present circumstances the rebuilding of Palestine is
the only object that has a sufficiently strong appeal to
stimulate the Jews to effective corporate action." But he
objected to a law that required him to join the official
Jewish religious community in Berlin. He said, "Much as
I feel myself a Jew, I feel far removed from traditional
religious forms."
As the Nazi movement grew stronger, Einstein helped to
organize a non-partisan group, within the Jewish
community, that advocated a united stand against
fascism. Hitler's climb to power, bringing official
support of vicious anti-Semitism, was making the
position of Jews and other opponents of Nazism
impossible. After Einstein left Germany in 1932 he
never returned. In March 1933 he once again renounced
German citizenship. His remaining property in Germany
was confiscated, and his name appeared on the first Nazi
list of people stripped of their citizenship.
Many universities abroad were eager to invite the
renowned scientist, but he had already accepted an offer
to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey. He arrived in the United States in October
1933, and in 1940 became an American citizen.
"How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for
those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place
even I would be an ardent patriot."
During a stay in England in September 1933, Einstein
met with Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and
prominent British scientists and intellectuals. He tried to warn them of the Nazi danger. Many noted academics
were fleeing Germany, few of them received abroad as
warmly as Einstein. He worked on behalf of the
Emergency Committee to Aid Displaced German
Scholars and other organizations that tried to find homes
for both Jewish and political refugees.
Einstein's Public Activities: 1930-1935:
1930
· With Stefan Zweig, Bertrand Russell, and
others, signs petition favoring the Kellogg-
Briand arms limitation pact.
· Appeals against conscription and military
training of young men; signs petition with
Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland, and others.
· Speaks at the New History Society, New York,
translated by the pacifist Rosika Schwimmer.
1931
· Attends special screening in Hollywood of "All
Quiet on the Western Front," a film banned in
Germany; supports the German League for
Human Rights campaign to have the film shown
in Germany.
· Speaks at the California Institute of Technology
on the social role of science.
· Addresses a peace group at Chicago railway
station.
· Joins an international protest to save lives of
eight Scottsboro, Alabama blacks wrongly
convicted of rape.
· Speaks at a mass protest meeting supporting E.J.
Grumbel, a liberal professor under attack in
Germany.
· Supports the International Union of Antimilitarist
Clergymen and Ministers, who call for
a Geneva peace conference.
· Speaks at a student meeting of League of The
Nations Association.
· Meets with War Resisters International; sends
message to their conference in France.
1932
· Attends meeting of the Los Angeles University
of International Relations.
· Speaks to the Joint Peace Council, with Lord
Ponsonby, on the failure of disarmament
conferences.
· Exchanges letters with Freud under auspices of
International Institute of Intellectual
Cooperation, leading to publication of pamphlet,
"Why War?"
1933
· Addresses student group at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
· Resigns from the Prussian and Bavarian
Academies of Science in protest after Hitler
takes power; in open letter, he denies the
accusation that he spread propaganda on anti-
Semitic atrocities.
· Accepts election as a Founding Member, with
Lord Davies, of the New Commonwealth
Society; discusses international army and navy
police force.
· Speaks at a mass meeting in London for the
Refugee Assistance Fund to aid victims of the
Nazis.
· Guest of honor at the World Peaceways dinner
in New York.
1934
· Speaks at a Princeton, New Jersey state
conference on Causes and Cures of War.
· Sends letter to the Anti-War Committee at New
York University.
· Makes national radio speech on Brotherhood
Day, sponsored by National Conference of
Christians and Jews.
· Sends message to the Educators and World
Peace conference of the Progressive Education
Association in New York.
1935
· With Alfred E. Smith, speaks on national radio
and at a New York dinner to aid political and
non-Jewish refugees from Germany.
· Helps to initiate campaign for a Nobel Peace
Prize for the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, then ill
in a German concentration camp.
· With John Dewey and Alvin Johnson, becomes
member of the United States section of the
International League for Academic Freedom.
· Speaks at Passover celebration in at the
Manhattan Opera House, urging Jewish-Arab
amity in Palestine.
In 1916 Einstein devised an improved fundamental
statistical theory of heat, embracing the quantum of
energy. His theory predicted that as light passed
through a substance it could stimulate the emission
of more light. This effect is at the heart of the
modern laser.
This theory was further developed by the Indian
physicist S.N. Bose. He sent a draft paper to
Einstein, who was inspired to develop a still more
general approach.
Beginning in 1925 a bold new quantum theory emerged,
the creation of a whole generation of theoretical
physicists from many nations. Soon scientists were
vigorously debating how to interpret the new quantum
mechanics. Einstein took an active part in these
discussions. Heisenberg, Bohr, and other creators of the
theory insisted that it left no meaningful way open to
discuss certain details of an atom's behavior. For
example, one could never predict the precise moment
when an atom would emit a quantum of light. Einstein
could not accept this lack of certainty; and he raised one
objection after another. At the Solvay Conferences of
1927 and 1930 the debate between Bohr and Einstein
went on day and night, neither man conceding defeat.
"Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner
voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory
says a lot, but does not really bring us closer to the secret
of the 'Old One.' I, at any rate, am convinced that He is
not playing at dice."
By the mid 1930s, Einstein had accepted quantum
mechanics as a consistent theory for the statistics of the
behavior of atoms. He recognized that it was "the most
successful physical theory of our time." This theory,
which he had helped to create, could explain nearly all
the physical phenomena of the everyday world.
Eventually the applications would include transistors,
lasers, a new chemistry, and more. Yet Einstein could
not accept quantum mechanics as a completed theory,
for its mathematics did not describe individual events.
Einstein felt that a more basic theory, one that could
completely describe how each individual atom behaved,
might yet be found. By following the approach of his
own general theory of relativity, he hoped to dig deeper
than quantum mechanics. The search for a deeper theory
was to occupy much of the rest of his life.
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the
orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns
himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
The general theory of relativity, unlike quantum theory,
was not rapidly developed after Einstein showed the
way. Gravity was now understood in a new way, but the
equations were difficult to work with. And the
characteristics of the theory showed up clearly only
under extreme conditions, enormous densities or vast
spaces or measurements of the highest precision.
Eventually technology caught up -- the modern Global
Positioning System cannot pin down a location without
using the equations of general relativity to adjust for
effects of gravity and speed. And astronomers have
discovered black holes, objects with so much mass that
they cannot be understood at all without Einstein's
equations. But during Einstein's lifetime only one such
object was known: the universe taken as a whole.
In 1917 Einstein and the Dutch astronomer Willem de
Sitter showed that Einstein's equations could be used to
describe a highly simplified universe. Other scientists
developed this model, adapting it to the real universe full
of stars. They found a difficulty: the model had to show
the stars either all moving apart, as if from a giant
explosion, or all collapsing together upon each other.
But Einstein had found room in his equations for an
extra mathematical term, the "cosmological term" as he
called it. He could adjust this term to give a new model:
an unchanging model universe.
In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble
discovered evidence that distant galaxies of stars are
moving away from our galaxy, and away from each
other, as if the entire universe were expanding. The
original Einstein equations might give an exact
description of our universe after all. Quickly convinced
by Hubble's evidence, Einstein felt that his notion of a
"cosmological term" was a mistake. Other scientists
withheld judgment, and debate over the cosmological
term still continues today. But most astronomers agree
that with or without the cosmological term, Einstein's
equations give the best available language for a
description of the overall structure of the universe.
"I want to know how God created this world. I am not
interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of
this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest
are details."
"I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not
care for money. Decorations, titles, or distinctions mean
nothing to me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that
gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin, and my
sailboat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers."
"Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief
objective of all technological effort -- concern for the big,
unsolved problems of how to organize human work and
the distribution of commodities in such a manner as to
assure that the results of our scientific thinking may be a
blessing to mankind, and not a curse."
Scientists in the 1930s, using machines that could break
apart the nuclear cores of atoms, confirmed Einstein's
formula E=mc² . The release of energy in a nuclear
transformation was so great that it could cause a
detectable change in the mass of the nucleus. But the
study of nuclei -- in those years the fastest growing area
of physics -- had scant effect on Einstein. Nuclear
physicists were gathering into ever-larger teams of
scientists and technicians, heavily funded by
governments and foundations, engaged in experiments
using massive devices. Such work was alien to Einstein's
habit of abstract thought, done alone or with a
mathematical assistant. In return, experimental nuclear
physicists in the 1930s had little need for Einstein's
theories.
In August 1939 nuclear physicists came to Einstein, not
for scientific but for political help. The fission of the
uranium nucleus had recently been discovered. A longtime
friend, Leo Szilard, and other physicists realized
that uranium might be used for enormously devastating
bombs. They had reason to fear that Nazi Germany
might construct such weapons. Einstein, reacting to the
danger from Hitler's aggression, had already abandoned
his strict pacifism. He now signed a letter that was
delivered to the American president, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, warning him to take action. This letter, and a
second Einstein-Szilard letter of March 1940, joined
efforts by other scientists to prod the United States
government into preparing for nuclear warfare. Einstein
played no other role in the nuclear bomb project. As a
German who had supported left-wing causes, he was
denied security clearance for such sensitive work. But
during the war he did perform useful service as a
consultant for the United States Navy's Bureau of
Ordnance.
"The feeling for what ought and ought not to be grows and
dies like a tree, and no fertilizer of any kind will do much
good. What the individual can do is give a fine example,
and have the courage to firmly uphold ethical convictions
in a society of cynics. I have for a long time tried to
conduct myself this way, with varying success."
After the Japanese surrendered under nuclear
bombardment, Einstein was often in the public eye. In
May 1946 he became chairman of the newly formed
Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, joining
their drive for international and civilian control of
nuclear energy. He recorded fund-raising radio messages
for the group, and wrote a widely read article on their
work. Einstein's appeals for nuclear disarmament had an
influence among both scientists and the general public.
He also spoke out in opposition to German rearmament,
defended conscientious objectors against military
service, and criticized the Cold War policies of the
United States. An early and firm supporter of the United
Nations, he was convinced that the solution to
international conflict was world law, world government,
and a strong world police force. "I am opposed to the use
of force under any circumstances, except when
confronted by an enemy who pursues the destruction of
life as an end in itself."
"Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark
and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the
human race or shall mankind renounce war? People will
not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish
war."

Although his activity was limited by advancing age and
ill health, Einstein made clear his commitment to civil
liberties. He attacked racial prejudice and supported the
black civil rights movement. He called for a homeland in
Palestine for the Jewish people, in which the rights of
Arabs would also be respected. Meanwhile, he supported
the creation of a Jewish university in the United States
(the future Brandeis University). When the House
Committee on Un-American Activities maligned
teachers and other intellectuals, Einstein publicly
advised the people under attack not to cooperate, but to
follow the principle of civil disobedience. He was
equally uncompromising when he refused any
association with Germany. He even rejected honors from
his native land -- he could not forgive the murder of
Jews by Germans.
In 1952 Einstein was offered the position of President of
Israel, a chiefly honorific post. Old and sick, but at peace
in his Princeton home and office, he turned down the
invitation. His interest in public affairs, however,
continued. In 1955 he joined Bertrand Russell in urging
scientists toward mediation between East and West and
limitation of nuclear armament. Meanwhile he was
writing a speech for the anniversary of Israel's
independence. An incomplete draft of the speech was
found at his bedside after he died.
"The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations
to national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes
understanding of the situation more than anything else is
that the term mankind feels vague and abstract. People...
can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they,
individually, and those whom they love are in imminent
danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that
perhaps war may be allowed to continue... this hope is
illusory."
"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our
science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike
-- and yet it is the most precious thing we have."
From before 1920 until his death in 1955, Einstein
struggled to find laws of physics far more general than
any known before. In his theory of relativity, the force of
gravity had become an expression of the geometry of
space and time. The other forces in nature, above all the
force of electromagnetism, had not been described in
such terms. But it seemed likely to Einstein that
electromagnetism and gravity could both be explained as
aspects of some broader mathematical structure. The
quest for such an explanation -- for a "unified field"
theory that would unite electromagnetism and gravity,
space and time, all together -- occupied more of
Einstein's years than any other activity.
"I see in Nature a magnificent structure... that must fill a
thinking person with a feeling of humility..."
Einstein thought that if only he could find the right
unified field theory, that theory might also explain the
structure of matter. Thus he could fill the troubling gap
in quantum theory -- the inability to describe the world
otherwise than in terms of mere probabilities. He
doubted his ability to find this "more complete theory,"
but he was convinced that someday, somebody would
find it. "I cannot," he admitted, "base this conviction on
logical reasons -- my only witness is the pricking of my
little finger."
Over the years Einstein proposed unified field theories in
various mathematical forms. Flaws were detected in his
theories one by one, usually by Einstein himself.
Undiscouraged, he would try new formulations, only to
see them fail in turn. Sooner or later most of the other
scientists who had joined the search gave it up. Einstein
kept on, aware that many of his colleagues thought he
was pursuing a will-o'-the wisp. One young physicist
described him as a luminary shining in helpless
isolation. Einstein knew better than anyone the
limitations of his efforts, but the relentless work held a
"fascinating magic" for him. "One cannot help but be in
awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of
life, of the marvelous structure of reality," he wrote. "It
is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of
this mystery each day." With this credo Einstein had
already given humanity a new view of the physical
universe, and a model for what a person of conscience
may achieve.
What follows is an essay by Einstein entitled “The
World as I see it”.
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here
for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not,
though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without
deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one
exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose
smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly
dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to
whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A
hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner
and outer life are based on the labors of other men,
living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to
give in the same measure as I have received and am still
receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in
themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a
pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time
after time have given me new courage to face life
cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind,
without the occupation with the objective world, the
eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific
endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The
trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward
success, and luxury -- have always seemed to me
contemptible.
"My passionate sense of social justice and social
responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my
pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other
human beings and human communities. I am truly a
'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country,
my home, my friends, or even my immediate family,
with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have
never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."
"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be
respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an
irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of
excessive admiration and reverence from my fellowbeings,
through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The
cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for
many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with
my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I
am quite aware that for any organization to reach its
goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and
generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be
coerced; they must be able to choose their leader. In my
opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon
degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The
really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems
to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient
individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and
the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in
thought and dull in feeling.
"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life,
the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of
civilization ought to be abolished with all possible
speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all
the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of
patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the
mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at
the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not
know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is
as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the
experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that
engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of
something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the
profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which
only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our
minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that
constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this
sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with
the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a
sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well
as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion
of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

A conversation that took place between Einstein and
India’s noble Prize winning poet, Rabindra nath Tagore
in Berlin in 1930 is worth quoting here.
Einstein: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from
the world?
Tagore: Not isolated. The infinite personality of man
comprehends the universe. There can not be anything
that canot be subsumed by the human personality, and
Tagore: this proves that the truth of the universe is
human truth.
Einstein: There are two different conceptions about the
nature of the universe - the world as a unity dependent
on humanity, and the world as reality independent of the
human factor.
Tagore: When our universe is in harmony with man,
the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.
Einstein: This is a purely human conception of the
universe.
Tagore: The world is a human world - the scientific
view of it is also that of the scientific man. Therefore,
the world apart from us does not exist; it is a relative
world, depending for its reality upon our consciousness.
There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which
gives it truth, the standard of the eternal man whose
experiences are made possible through our experiences.
Einstein: This is a realization of the human entity.
Tagore: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it
through our emotions and activities. We realize the
supreme man, who has no individual limitations, through
our limitations.
Science is concerned with that which is not confined to
individuals; it is the impersonal human world of truths.
Religion realizes these truths and links them up with our
deeper needs. Our individual consciousness of truth
gains universal significance. Religion applies values to
truth, and we know truth as good through own harmony
with it

                                 CHAPTER IX

NIRVANA  OF SUFIS THROUGH DEATH        SENTENCES                                                                                           

Union by Yoga with God means the knowledge and enjoyment of our oneness with him in our self existent being and of a certain differentiation in our active being, says Aurobindo. We get the description of a Yoga which would seem at first sight to be incompatible with works and we get the repeated use of the word Nirvana to describe the status to which the Yogi arrives.  The mark of this status is the supreme peace of a calm self-extinction as if to make it quite clear that it is not the Buddhist’s Nirvana in a blissful negation of being, but the Vedantic loss of a partial in a perfect being that it intends extinction in the Brahman; and the Brahman here certainly seems to mean the Immutable, to denote primarily at least the inner timeless Self withdrawn from active participation in the externality of Nature.               

“When the soul is no longer attached to the touches of outward things,” Gita says, “then one finds the happiness that exists in the Self; such a one enjoys an imperishable happiness, because his self is in Yoga with the Brahman.” The non-attachment is essential, it says, in order to be free from the attacks of desire and wrath and passion, a freedom without which true happiness is not possible. That happiness and that equality are to be gained entirely by man in the body: he is not to suffer any least remnant of the subjection to the troubled lower nature to remain in the idea that the perfect release will come by a putting off of the body; a perfect spiritual freedom is to be won here upon earth and possessed and enjoyed in the human life.

The Gita goes on to say, “Sages win Nirvana in the Brahman, they in whom the stains of sin are effaced and the knot of doubt is cut asunder, masters of their selves, who are occupied in doing good to all creatures.” That would almost seem to mean that to be thus is to be in Nirvana. But the next verse is quite clear and decisive, “Those who practice self-mastery by Yoga and austerity, who are delivered from desire and wrath and have gained self-mastery, for them Nirvana in the Brahman exists all about them, encompasses them, they already live in it because they have knowledge of the Self.”

Nirvana when we gain it, enter into it, is not only  within us, but all around because this is not  only the Brahman-consciousness which lives secret within us,  but the Brahman-consciousness in which we live. “Having put  outside of himself all outward touches and concentrated the  vision between the eyebrows and exercising breath-control, having controlled the senses,  the mind and the understanding, the sage devoted to liberation,  from whom desire and wrath and fear have passed away is  ever free.” 

Works are to be done, but with what purpose and in what order? They are first to be done while ascending the hill of Yoga, for then works are the cause of self-perfection,  of liberation, of nirvana in the Brahman; for by doing works with  a steady practice of the inner renunciation this perfection, this  liberation, this conquest of the desire-mind and the ego-self and  the lower nature are easily accomplished.  

By the process of meditation the Yogi is directed to practice continually union with the Self so that that may become his normal consciousness. He is to sit apart and alone, with all desire and idea of possession banished from his mind, self-controlled in his whole being and consciousness. “He should sit in a pure spot his firm seat, neither too high, nor yet too low, covered with a cloth, with a deer-skin, with sacred grass, and there seated with a concentrated mind and with the workings of the mental consciousness and the senses under control he should practice Yoga for self-purification”.

This peace of Nirvana is reached when all the mental consciousness  is perfectly controlled and liberated from desire and  remains still in the Self, when, motionless like the light of a lamp  in a windless place, it ceases from its restless action, shut in from  its outward motion, and by the silence and stillness of the mind  the Self is seen within, not disfigured as in the mind, but in the  Self, seen, not as it is mistranslated falsely or partially by the  mind and represented to us through the ego, but self-perceived  by the Self.

The firm winning of this inalienable spiritual bliss is Yoga, it is the divine union; it is the greatest of all gains and the treasure beside which all others lose their value. Therefore is this Yoga to be resolutely practiced without yielding to any discouragement by difficulty or failure until the release, until the bliss of Nirvana is secured as an eternal possession.  

To see God in the world is to fear nothing, it is to embrace all in the being of God; to see all as the Divine is to hate and loathe nothing, but love God in the world and the world in God. All is embraced in the equality of the self-vision. “He, O Arjuna, who sees with equality everything in the image of the Self, whether it be grief or it be happiness, him I hold to be the supreme Yogi.” And by this it is not meant at  all that he himself shall fall from the griefless spiritual bliss and  feel again worldly unhappiness, even in the sorrow of others, but  seeing in others the play of the dualities which he himself has left  and surmounted, he shall still see all as himself, his self in all,  God in all and, not disturbed or bewildered by the appearances  of these things, moved only by them to help and heal, to occupy  himself with the good of all beings, to lead men to the spiritual  bliss, to work for the progress of the world God wards, he shall  live the divine life, so long as days upon earth are his portion. 

The Gita brings in here as always devotion as the climax of the Yoga ;  that may almost be said to sum up the whole final result of  the Gita’s teaching—whoever loves God in all and his soul is  founded upon the divine oneness, however he lives and acts,  lives and acts in God. “Of all Yogis he who with all his inner self given up to me, for Me has love and faith, him I hold to be the most united with Me in Yoga.” 

Great examples are found in Sufis of love and faith in God. The first expression of Philosophy in Islam (757) was the growth of a school of “Mutazilites” – i.e., Secedes – who denied the eternity of Koran. They protested their respect for Islam’s holy book, but they argued where it or Habit contradicted reason, Koran or the traditions must be interpreted allegorically; and they gave the name Kalama or logic to this effort to reconcile reason and faith. It seemed to them absurd to take literally those Organic passages that ascribed hands and feet, anger and hatred, to Allah; such poetic anthropomorphism, however adapted to the moral and political ends of Mohammed at the time, could hardly be accepted by the educated intellect. The human mind could never know what was the real nature or attributes of God; it could only agree with faith in affirming a spiritual power as the foundation of all reality. Furthermore, to the Mutazilites, it seemed fatal to human morality and enterprise to believe, as orthodoxy did, in the complete predestination of all events by God, and the arbitrary election, from all eternity, of the saved and the damned.

Mutability doctrines spread rapidly under the rule of al-Mansard, Harun al-Rashid, and al-Mamun In 832 al-Mamun issued a decree requiring all Moslems to admit that the Koran had been created in time; further decrees extended to the doctrines of fee will, and the impossibility of the soul ever seeing God with a physical eye.

Moslem mysticism had many roots: the ascetism of the Hindu fakirs, the Gnosticism of Egypt and Syria, the Neo-Platonist speculation of the later Greeks and the example of Christian monks. Most Moslem mystics called themselves Sufis, from the simple robe of wool that they wore. They maintain that the knowledge of God is found in our own hearts, after our detachment from all physical desires, and the concentration of mind upon the desired object. Not only there is no god but Allah, there is no being but God. Consequently each soul is God and that “God and I are one.” 

Al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj (857-922) was a Persian Moslem mystic and martyr. He reinforced ecstatic and pantheistic tendencies already present in the Islamic third century, and they became a continuing part of Islamic life after al-Hallaj's teaching and martyrdom.

Al-Hallaj was born in what is now southern Iran but was educated in Arabic-speaking Iraq, studying with one of the eminent Sufis, or mystics, of the time, Sahl al-Tustari. After his marriage in 877, al-Hallaj settled in the capital of the Abbasid Empire, Baghdad, and continued to study and experience mysticism. He made three pilgrimages to Mecca, each of which was a deep emotional experience for him, and he is also alleged to have traveled in India and central Asia.

Al-Hallaj early began to preach to crowds of listeners about his ecstatic mystical experiences. This brought him to the notice of the orthodox theologians. A political reform movement led by religious persons, in which al-Hallaj does not seem to have been personally involved, led to a reaction against the reformers. He was arrested and imprisoned in 911 with many others, but after being pilloried as a politico religious extremist (he seems to have been wholly inactive politically), he was kept under lenient arrest in the caliph's palace. There he influenced powerful personages such as the queen mother and the vizier Ibn Isa.

Financial corruption among candidates for the vizier's office led to the public trial in 921-922 of al-Hallaj, whose execution for heterodoxy was desired by one of the contenders to prove his own support of the orthodox position. The condemnation was pushed through, despite much popular sentiment in favor of al-Hallaj, on the grounds that he had said, "I am the Truth,” that is, "I am God." He was scourged with a thousand strips and burned to death in 922.

Shaikh Abu-Said Abil-Kheir was one of the earlier Sufi poets. He lived more than two centuries before Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi yet, like Rumi, much of his mysticism follows a similar path of annihilation in divine Love.

Abu-Said's poetry ranges from the ecstatic and celestial, to struggles with abandonment. His poetry has an immediacy and even a sort of devoutly wry petulance that can draw comparisons with the great Bengali poet, Ramprasad.

Abu Said referred to himself as “Nobody, Son of Nobody,” to convey the mystic's sense of having completely merged or disappeared into the Divine, leaving no trace of the ego behind.

He lived in Mayhana in what is modern day Turkmenistan, just north of Iran and Afghanistan in Central Asia. “The true saint,” said Abu Said, “goes in and out amongst the people, eats and sleeps with them, buys and sells in the market, marries and takes part in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment.” A few sayings of Abu Said quoted from his biography Asrar al-Tawhid :

• The veil between man and God is not the world, is not the throne of God, it is the illusion of "I", pass beyond yourself and you are there.
• Anywhere the illusion of “I” exists is hell, anywhere “I” is absent is heaven.
• If you are not going to sacrifice your self do not spend your time with Sufi nonsense.
• Sufism is fixing the gaze at One and living towards One.
• The meaning of Sufism is to put down what is in your head and to spare what is in your hand and not to shake when calamities befall you.
• Holding a grudge is heresy and attributing things to any cause but God is idolatry and joyfulness is duty.

Sheikh Abu Saeed was in same era as famous scholar Avicenna. And they got discussion during 3 days in privacy. After meeting concluded, the students asked Avicenna what he got from Sheikh Abu Saeed. He replied, 'whatever I know, he can see'. On the other hand, the disciples of Sheikh Abu Saeed asked him what he obtained from Avicenna. He replied, 'whatever i can see, he knows. 

In Rubiat he wrote:

If you wants that you get the asset of nobles then don't like that anyone get grievance from you don't fear about death, don't get worry for livelihood because every both will reach on their time in any case.

                                                Abu Said and Avicenna         

There were two religious leaders — Abu Bakr Eshaq and the other Qadhi Sa'id who were extreme fundamentalists and considered Abu Sa'id a heretic. As a result, they took every opportunity to stop him. When all their efforts failed, they decided that he should be killed. So they wrote to Sultan Mahmud, saying, "A man who claims to be a Sufi has appeared who instead of reciting the Koran and recounting traditions of the Prophet as his sessions, recites poetry, sings and dances. For meals, instead of eating sparely, he and his disciples feed on broiled chicken and other fine dishes and sweets. He claims to be an ascetic, but this is not the manner of an ascetic or a Sufi. He is up to something evil and has led may people astray. "Mahmud answered that the local religious authorities should hold counsel together and deal with this Sufi master in any way they felt would satisfy the Islamic canon law. The Sultan's reply came on a Thursday and in no time, the whole city knew about it. The masses of people who were the master's followers were upset, because they knew the reply was really Abu Sa'id's death sentence.

A short while before sunset, Abu Sa'id called his trusted disciple Hasan and asked, "How many darvishes are there in the khanaqah?"

"Eighty guests from other cities and forty who live here. Altogether, a hundred and twenty," Hasan replied.

"What are you going to feed them for breakfast?" Abu Sa'id wondered.

"Whatever the master orders," answered Hasan.

"You should serve every one roasted lamb heads with plenty of sweets and rosewater. Moreover, burn some incense. Make sure to set all of this on a clean white cotton cloth in the middle of the city's mosque, so that those who backbite us can see what viands God provides his elect from the unseen world." So ordered the master.

Hasan left the marketplace with absolutely no money in his pocket, for there was none in the khanaqah. Once there, he thought he might be able to beg for the money; he was certainly not going to complain to Abu Sa'id about any lack of funds. He stayed at the entrance of the market, until he saw the shopkeepers closing up and going home. No one helped him out. He resolved not to go back, even if he had to stay all night long. The market was completely empty. The hours passed. Finally a man came walking toward him. He approached and asked Hasan why he was standing there. Hasan told him the whole story. The man smiled and opened up a bag, telling him to reach in and take as much money as he desired. With that money, Hasan managed to provide all the food the master had ordered.

The next morning breakfast was arranged as planned. The master and the darvishes came to eat. A large group of people had gathered to see the Sufis' fate, but found them eating merrily and seemingly not concerned at all. Word reached Abu Bakr. His comment was, "Let them have this last meal; tomorrow they will be food for the vultures."

After breakfast Abu Sa'id told Hasan to prepare a place for the Sufis in the front row of the Friday prayer. The prayer leader that day was Qadhi Sa'id, Abu Sa'id's other enemy. Hasan prepared one hundred and twenty places for the Sufis in the first row and the prayer started. As was the custom, the Friday congregational prayer had two parts. The first was devotional and like any other, but the second part was a sermon given by the prayer leader usually about subjects that concerned society.

Abu Sa'id finished the devotional portion but did not stay for the lecture afterwards. Qadhi Sa'id opened his mouth to preach his sermon, but the master turned and stared at him. Suddenly, Qadhi Sa'id became quiet and could not speak until all the Sufis had left.

When they came out of the mosque, Abu Sa'id told Hasan to go to the market and buy pastry from one stall and almonds from another and to take them to Abu Bakr, telling him, "Abu Sa'id would like you to break your fast with these."

Abu Bakr looked puzzled at first when he received the message; then he became amazed. After a few minutes, he sent a messenger to Qadhi Sa'id saying that he was not willing to cooperate with him in killing Abu Sa'id and that Qadhi Sa'id was on his own. It so happened that on that day Abu Bakr had decided to fast but had not mentioned it to anyone. On his way to the Friday prayer he had taken the road by the market, where he had seen the sweets. He had craved that very pastry, and those very almonds, but since he was fasting had decided to have the treat for dinner. But after the prayers were done, something came up and he had completely forgotten about what he had promised himself.

All of this had happened without anyone else being aware of it. When Abu Sa'id had sent him what he wanted, he felt that he did not have the strength to fight someone who knew so much about what went on in people's hearts.                        

                               CHAPTER X

   KARMAYOGA OF  ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Make the work you have to do here your means of inner spiritual rebirth, the divine birth, and, having become divine, do still divine works as an instrument of the Divine for the leading of the peoples. Therefore here are  two things which have  to be clearly laid down and clearly grasped, the way to the  change, to this upward transference, this new divine birth, and  the nature of the work or rather the spirit in which it has to  be done, since the outward form of it need not at all change,  although really its scope and aim become quite different.

We may live in what is now our natural being or we may live in our greater and spiritual being. This is the first great distinction on which the Karmayoga of the Gita is founded. 

A mastery of the senses, an ability to do without all  that they hanker after, is the first condition of the true soullife;  only so can we begin to feel that there is a soul within  us which is other than the mutations of mind in its reception  of the touches of outward things, a soul which in its depths  goes back to something self-existent, immutable, tranquil, self-possessed,  grandiose, serene and august, master of itself and  unaffected by the eager runnings of our external nature. 

We must get rid then of desire and, that  propensity of our natural being destroyed, the passions which  are its emotional results will fall into quietude; for the joy and  grief of possession and of loss, success and failure, pleasant and  unpleasant touches, which entertain them, will pass out of our  souls. A calm equality will then be gained. And since we have still to live and act in the world and our nature in works is to seek for the fruits of our works, we must change that nature and do works without attachment to their fruits, otherwise desire and all its results remain.

We must get rid then of desire and, that  propensity of our natural being destroyed, the passions which  are its emotional results will fall into quietude; for the joy and  grief of possession and of loss, success and failure, pleasant and  unpleasant touches, which entertain them, will pass out of our  souls. A calm equality will then be gained. And since we have still to live and act in the world and our nature in works is to seek for the fruits of our works, we must change that nature and do works without attachment to their fruits, otherwise desire and all its results remain.

 Works must be done as a sacrifice to this Lord of our works, and we must by growing into the Self realize our oneness with him in our being and see our personality as a partial manifestation of him in Nature. One with him in being we grow one with all beings in the universe and do divine works, not as ours, but as his workings through us for the maintenance and leading of the peoples.  This is the essential thing to be done.

In performance of works there is no greater example in the world than Alexander the Great. Plutarch said of him “In an amazing eleven-year journey of conquest, young Alexander of Macedonia conquered all the way from Egypt to India.   Behind him came Greek institutions and the Greek language, which became the standard of the ancient world.”                      

Alexander had light skin, blond hair, and melting blue eyes.  A sweet natural fragrance came from his body, so strong that it perfumed his clothes.  He disdained a life of comfortable sloth.  This young warrior was always a great patron of the arts and of learning.  He enjoyed and encouraged hunting and the martial arts, except for boxing.

Bucephalus was Alexander's horse throughout most of his career.  Some horse traders had brought this magnificent animal to King Philip and offered him for sale, but no man could ride him.  The traders were taking Bucephalus away when Alexander remarked that it was a shame to lose such a fine horse just because no one knew the right way to manage him.  Philip at first ignored the boy, but Alexander persisted.   Finally Philip said: "Do you presume to criticize those who are older than you, as if you knew more, and could do better?"  Alexander boldly declared that he would ride the horse, and everyone laughed.  He bet the price of the horse, and got the chance to try.

Alexander had noticed that Bucephalus was afraid of his own shadow, so he turned the horse to face the sun and settled him down, then walked him in that direction for a while, stroking him whenever he became eager and fiery.   Suddenly, Alexander jumped on his back and drew in the bridle gently, but firmly, until all rebelliousness was gone.  Then he let Bucephalus go at full speed, urging him on with a commanding voice.

Alexander's father and the others looked on nervously until they saw Alexander turn at the end of his run and come back in triumph.   "Oh my son," said King Philip with tears in his eyes, "Find yourself a kingdom equal to and worthy of yourself, for Macedonia is too little for you."

After this, Philip sent for Aristotle to be Alexander's tutor.  Ordinary teachers would not be enough for Alexander, who could easily be led by reason but refused to submit to compulsion.  All kinds of learning and reading interested him, but Homer’s Iliad   was by far his favorite book.  He always took a copy, annotated by Aristotle, along on his campaigns.  Aristotle had a profound influence on Alexander, who said that he loved Aristotle as much as Philip -- his father had given him life, and his teacher had taught him to use it.

When Alexander was sixteen, Philip left him in charge of Macedonia while he went away on a campaign against the people of Byzantium.  The Maedi rebelled while Philip was gone, and Alexander led an army against their largest city.  He moved out the Maedi and renamed the city "Alexandropolis," after himself.

Philip put Alexander in command of the cavalry at the Battle of Chaeronea, and Alexander led the charge that broke the Theban Sacred Band.  This early bravery made his father so fond of him that Philip liked nothing better than to hear his soldiers say that Philip was their general, but Alexander was their king.

Philip had a stormy home life with Alexander's mother, Olympias.  Philip had spied on her once and seen a snake in her bed, and ever since then they had been estranged.  Philip's new marriages enraged Olympias, who was a violent, jealous, and unforgiving woman.  The trouble in the women's chambers spread to the whole kingdom.  Olympias even managed to turn Alexander against his father.

The breaking point came when Philip married Cleopatra, the very young niece of Attalus.  At the wedding feast, Attalus (who was drunk), in his toast, asked the Macedonians to pray to the gods for a lawful successor to the kingdom through his niece.  This so irritated Alexander that he threw a cup at Attalus and shouted: "What am I then -- a bastard?"  Philip (who was also drunk) took Attalus' side and came at Alexander with a sword, but he slipped and fell down on the floor.  Alexander derided his drunk and clumsy father and then left Macedonia, along with Olympias.

Shortly afterwards, Philip was murdered.   The assassin was Pausanias, who was angry because Philip had refused to give him justice for some injury done to him by Attalus.  But it was Philip's wife who was the instigator.  Olympias took this enraged young man and made him the instrument of her revenge against her husband.  Once Philip was out of the way, Olympias tortured her hated young rival, Cleopatra, to death.

So, at the age of only twenty, Alexander became king of Macedonia.

He liked hard work and dangerous enterprises, and could not bear to rest. He laughed at some of his generals, who had so many servants that they themselves could find nothing to do. “I wonder,” he told them, “that you with your experience do not know that those who work sleep more soundly than those for whom other people work. He grudged the time given to sleep, and said that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was mortal.” He was abstemious in eating and, until his last years, in drinking. He despised rich foods. Perhaps in consequence of these habits his complexion was remarkably clear, and his body and breath, says Plutarch, “were so fragrant as to perfume the clothes that he wore. He helped to introduce into Europe the custom of shaving the beard, on the ground that whiskers offered too ready a handle for an enemy to grasp.” In this little item, perhaps, lay his greatest influence upon history.

Mentally he was an ardent student, who was too soon consumed with responsibilities. Like so many men of action, he mourned he could not also be a thinker. “He had”, says Plutarch, “a violent thirst and passion for learning, which increased as time went on. . . He was a lover of all kinds of reading and knowledge,” and it was his delight, after a day of marching or fighting, to sit up half the night conversing with scholars and scientists.

Sexually he was almost virtuous. When his aides bought a beautiful woman to his tent late at night he asked her, “Why at this time?” “I had to wait,” she replied, “to get my husband to bed.” Alexander dismissed her, and rebuked his servants, saying that because of them he had almost become an adulterer.”

The neighboring states and the cities of Greece rebelled against Macedonian rule now that they saw a boy on the throne.  Alexander's council advised him to give up trying to subjugate the Greeks and to concentrate his resources on keeping the barbarian nations of the north under control.  Treat the Greeks kindly, they said, and that will dissipate the first impulses of rebellion.  

But Alexander rejected this advice.  If any sign of weakness were perceived at the beginning of his government, everyone would be encouraged to attack, so only in bravery was there safety.  First Alexander marched to the Danube and beat down all opposition from the tribes in that area.  When everything there was peaceful again, he turned south and marched to Greece.

There had been a revolution in Thebes.  The demagogues there were urging all of the other Greeks to join Thebes and free themselves from

Macedonian domination.  Athens also was being agitated by talk of war and rebellion, particularly from the demagogue Demosthenes.

After a march of two weeks, Alexander appeared at the walls of Thebes and demanded that the city send him the two leaders of the rebellion.   To show how willing he was to forgive what was in the past, Alexander offered a full pardon for all those that would take it.  The Thebans gave him an insulting reply, so Alexander killed six thousand of them, demolished their city, and sold all of the surviving inhabitants as slaves.

This severe example would make the other Greeks think twice about the consequences of disobedience.  And soon the Athenians repented and reaffirmed their allegiance to Macedonia.  Whether Alexander's new gentleness toward the Athenians was the result of remorse over the horrible cruelty done to Thebes, or merely that his passion for blood was satisfied, is not certain.  However, from then on Alexander always showed kindness to any Theban survivor he could find.

To the end of his life he maintained an attitude of respect and affection for Athens: he dedicated on the Acropolis various spoils from his Asiatic victories, sent back to Athens the Tyrannicide statues that Xerxes had taken away, and remarked, after an arduous campaign, “O ye Athenians, will you believe what dangers I incur to merit your praise?”

Soon afterwards, representatives of the Greeks assembled at Corinth and named Alexander to lead them in a war against Persia. While Alexander was at Corinth, politicians and philosophers came to congratulate him, but he noticed that the famous philosopher Diogenes, who lived there in Corinth, did not come.

So Alexander went to visit Diogenes at his home and found him lying down, sun-bathing.  Diogenes raised himself up a little when he heard the crowd approaching, and Alexander asked the philosopher very courteously if there was any favor a king could do for him.  Diogenes only said: "Yes, please take your shadow off me."  Alexander's companions, on the way back, were making fun of the simple-minded old man, but Alexander told them: "Laugh if you must, but if I were not Alexander I would choose to be Diogenes."

As Caeser forgave Brutus and Cicero, and Napoleon Fouche and Talleyrand, so Alexander forgave Harpalus, the treasurer who had absconded with his funds and had returned to beg forgiveness; the young conqueror reappointed him treasurer to all men’s astonishment, and apparently with good results.

Between 30,000 and 43,000 infantry and between 3,000 and 4,000 horsemen followed Alexander into Asia Minor [334 B.C.].  He had only 70 talents for their pay, and no more than thirty days' provisions.  Alexander was 200 talents in debt, having spent everything he had in making sure that his best men were able to provide for their families.  When one of his generals asked what he had kept for himself, Alexander answered: "My hope."  This general then refused the pension that Alexander offered him, saying: "Your soldiers will be your partners in that."

With such desire and determination, Alexander and his army crossed the Hellespont into Asia and came to Troy. At the tomb of Achilles, who was his ancestor on his mother’s side, Alexander anointed the gravestone with oil and then ran around it naked with his companions, according to the ancient custom.  Achilles, he said, was a lucky man to have had a good friend while he was alive and a good poet to preserve his memory after he was dead. 

Meanwhile, the Persians had camped on the other side of the Granicus River to prevent Alexander from crossing.  The Persian force numbered 20,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry, and their position was strong.  The river was deep, and its banks were high.  The task of assault seemed to be impossible, but Alexander immediately led thirteen squadrons of horsemen across under a shower of arrows.   With frenzied persistence they managed to get up the muddy banks and close with the enemy.

Alexander's white plume and brilliant armor made him easy to pick out, so the bravest Persians clustered where he was, and that is where the fight was most furious.  One Persian chieftain knocked Alexander dizzy with a battle-ax, but Clitus saved Alexander's life by spearing the assailant before he could finish the kill.

The Macedonian phalanx, meanwhile, had managed to get across the river and form up on the other side.  The Persians could not stand up against their push, and soon the whole Persian army was running for their lives.  The losses on the Persian side were 20,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry, but Alexander lost only 34 men.

This first victory changed everything.  All of the cities on the coast surrendered to Alexander, except for Halicarnassus and Miletus, which he had to take by force. He moved down the coast to take control of Lycia, then turned north to Phrygia. 

There, in the city of Gordium, he accepted the challenge of the Gordian Knot.  A very intricate knot tied together the yoke of an ancient chariot, and there was a legend that whoever could undo the knot would become the master of the world. Alexander pulled out his sword and chopped through the Gordian Knot, instead of involving himself in its mysterious entanglements.

 King Darius of Persia was on the way from Susa with an army of 600,000 men.  For some time, Alexander stayed in Cilicia, which Darius and his advisors attributed to Alexander’s fear of encountering the overwhelmingly large Persian force.  The real reason for Alexander's delay was that he was getting over a serious illness.

All of Alexander's attendants were afraid to try any remedies, because if their remedy failed, and Alexander died, the Macedonians might blame the physician.  But there was one, Philip the Acarnanian, who dared to try, and he risked his own life to save Alexander's.  Alexander received a letter from Parmenio, warning of treachery by this physician, who, said the letter, had been bribed by Darius to give poison instead of medicine.  Alexander read the letter, then put it under his pillow, showing it to no one. When Philip came in with the potion, Alexander took out the letter and handed it to him, and while Philip read the letter, Alexander drank the potion with a smile.  In a short time, Alexander was well.

The Persians had camped in flat and open country, where they could take advantage of their superiority in cavalry.  But as weeks passed with no sign of Alexander (who was recovering from his sickness), Darius' flatterers convinced him that the Greeks were afraid to fight, and therefore Darius should move his army to Issus to cut off their escape.  Darius marched to Issus at the same time that Alexander marched into Syria to meet him, and the two armies passed each other.  When Alexander heard that the Persians were behind him at Issus, he immediately turned back and hurried to fight there.

Darius was in an equal hurry to get out of Issus, because when he saw the rough terrain, which made his cavalry useless, and split up his army, he realized that the Greeks could have the advantage.  Before Darius could escape from his own trap, Alexander had arrived.  Alexander personally commanded the right wing, which crushed the Persian left.  Darius panicked and rode away, leaving behind his chariot, his bow, his shield, his mantle, his army, and 110,000 Persian casualties.

Among the captives taken in the Persian camp were the mother, wife, and daughters of Darius.  Alexander assured these women that they had nothing to fear from him or his men, since he fought with Darius only for his empire, and not for personal spite.  He guaranteed that they would continue to be treated according to their rank and would have everything they used to have from Darius. Alexander was always very chaste and courteous in his relations with the opposite sex, and he had a great respect for the institution of marriage.  He used to say that two things reminded him that he was human, and not a god: sleeping and the act of generation, as if to say that both weariness and lust are produced by the same weakness and imbecility of human nature.

In eating, also, Alexander was totally in command of his appetite, and neither a glutton nor a gourmet.  When offered the services of some cooks who were said to have great skill, he declined, saying that the best stimulus to a good appetite was a long march before breakfast and a moderate breakfast to create an appetite for dinner.  It was generally believed that Alexander was addicted to wine, but that impression arose from the fact that he liked to stay up late over wine talking.

When he had free time, Alexander would read, write, or hunt.  He would not have dinner until after dark, and this would be a very long meal because he loved good conversation.  Usually, his own talk was amusing and intelligent, but Alexander sometimes would lapse into braggadocio.  This gave his flatterers a chance to ride him, and put his friends in the unpleasant position of choosing between shame and danger -- they disdained to compete in flattery but were afraid not to join in. 

At Tarsus Alexander being ill, his physician Philip offered him a purgative drink. At that moment a letter was brought to the King warning him that Philip had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Alexander handed the letter to Philip, and as the latter read it, Alexander drank the draught – with no ill effect. His reputation for genorisity helped him in his wars; many of the enemy allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, and cities, not fearing to be sacked, opened their gates at his coming.

After the Battle of Issus [333 B.C.], Alexander sent some men to Damascus to take possession of the money and baggage that the Persian army had left there.  Every soldier in the Greek army became a rich man, with beautiful women for slaves.  Alexander allowed this because he wanted them to get a taste of barbaric luxury that would make them more eager to conquer more territory.  He considered it to be like giving bloodhounds the scent.

Then Alexander proceeded down the coast to the city of Tyre, which refused to surrender to him.  While his army sat down for a siege at Tyre [332 B.C.], Alexander went into Arabia.

He was a brave soldier whose obstinate perseverance marched on, with boyish heedlessness of impossibilities, to unprecedented victories. He supplied the inspiration and led his troops by the brilliance of his imagination, the fire of his unstudied oratory, the readiness and sincerity with which he shared their hardships and grief. He ruled with kindness and firmness the wide domain which his arms had won; he was loyal to the agreements which he signed with commanders and cities and he tolerated no oppression of his subjects by his appointees. Amid all the chaos of his campaigns he remained centered on the great purpose that even his death would not defeat: the unification of all the eastern Mediterranean world into one cultural whole, dominated by the expanding civilization of Greece.

One day, he fell behind the rest of his army because his old teacher, Lysimachus (whom he used to compare to Phoenix, the guardian of Achilles) could not keep up.  Night found Alexander in a very dangerous position: far behind his army and without any fire to combat the cold.  He noticed some enemy campfires, so he ran over to one, killed two soldiers with his knife, then carried back a burning stick to his men.  This was typical of Alexander -- he was always encouraging his men by a personal example of readiness to work and face danger.

 During the seven months that it took before Tyre finally was sacked, Darius wrote to Alexander and offered to pay ransom for the prisoners held by Alexander.  Darius also offered to give Alexander one of his daughters in marriage if Alexander would be satisfied with dominion over all of the countries west of the Euphrates.  Alexander told his friends about the offer, and asked their advice. Parmenio said, "If I were you, I would take it gladly."

Alexander responded, "So would I, if I were Parmenio, but I am Alexander, so I will send Darius a different answer."  This was Alexander's answer to Darius: "All of Asia is mine, including all of its treasure.  This money you offer is already mine.  As for your daughter, if I want to marry her, I will do so, whether or not you approve.  If there is something you want from me, you may come in person and ask for it.  Otherwise, I will have to go to where you are."

After Tyre and Gaza had been taken, Alexander went into Egypt.  He founded the city of Alexandria [331 B.C.] at the mouth of the Nile, pursuant to a dream he had.  His fortune-tellers predicted that Alexandria would become a great city that would feed many strangers, and so it came to pass.

Then Alexander decided to take a long journey to an oasis in the middle of a vast desert, to visit the temple of the god Ammon. Not only would water be scarce along the way, but sandstorms had buried whole armies there before.  All of these dangers and difficulties did not matter to Alexander, who could not be diverted from his plan once he had decided to do something. Alexander's good luck made him firm in his opinions, and his natural courage made him delight in overcoming difficulties, as if conquering armies was not enough, and only Nature herself was a fit opponent for him.

Alexander's good luck continued.  Heavy rain solved the water problem, and also prevented sand from blowing.  When the Macedonians lost their way, some ravens came to guide them.  These birds flew ahead to indicate the right direction, and at night the ravens' calls kept them on the right path.

At the temple of Ammon, Alexander asked the oracle whether he would be allowed to conquer the world, and the oracle said yes.  Returning out of Egypt, Alexander accepted the surrender of all countries west of the Euphrates.   Then he went after Darius, who by this time had gathered another army, this time of a million men.

The two armies came in sight of each other one night at Gaugamela [also known as Arbela, on October 1, 331 B.C. The noise and campfires of the vast barbarian camp were so frightening that some of Alexander's generals advised a night attack because it would be too dangerous to take on such a huge force in daylight.  But Alexander replied: "I will not steal victory."  To some, this sounded immature and conceited, but it was a wise strategy: if Darius lost this battle, in broad daylight on a field he had chosen, he would have no excuse for defeat, as he had before at Issus.  With his heart broken, Darius would not try again.  The war would be over, even though in his empire Darius had plenty of men and resources to keep up the fight for a long time.  So Alexander and his men rested until late the next morning. He awoke alert and cheerful after a long sleep.

As long as Alexander was riding around before battle, he used another horse besides Bucephalus, who by now was growing old.  But when the time came for fighting, he mounted Bucephalus, and commenced the attack.  On this day Alexander gave a long speech to the Thessalians and other Greeks, who answered him with loud shouts, whereupon he put his javelin into his left hand and lifted up his right to the gods in a prayer for victory.  Just at that moment, an eagle soared over him and then flew toward the enemy, and this omen put fire in each man's heart.  The horsemen charged at full speed, followed by the Macedonian phalanx.  The Persians did not wait for them, but fell back, and Alexander kept herding them into the center, where Darius stood, along with his best men.  These fugitives crowded in and impaired the ones who stood their ground, so that none of them could do any fighting.  Dead Persian bodies piled so high around Darius that they almost covered the horses of his chariot.  Darius mounted a mare, and once again he left his army behind him.  

Parmenio, who had command of the left wing, sent an urgent message to Alexander, saying that if reinforcements were not sent from the front to the rear, the Greek camp and all of the baggage would be lost to the Persians.  Alexander replied to Parmenio that he should remember that if they won, they would not only recover their own baggage but also take the enemy's; and if they lost, then they would not have to worry about possessions because their only business would be to die like brave men.

Without opposition, Alexander marched to Babylon, which immediately surrendered.  Then he went to Susa, where he took possession of an immense amount of gold and other treasures.  He continued on into Persia itself and took Persepolis, the capital, where he spent the winter with his army [January - May, 330 B.C.].  Darius, meanwhile, escaped to the north with a small remnant of his once-splendid force.

Before going to find Darius, Alexander held a party for his officers.  He even let them bring women with them, one of whom was a certain courtesan named Thais from Athens.  After the drinking had gone on for some time, Thais announced that she would like to burn down the palace built by King Xerxes, who had burned down Athens.  Thus, she said, it might be said that even the women who followed Alexander took greater revenge on the Persians than all of the Greek generals who had tried before.  This flattering and amusing proposal naturally got a good reaction from the drunken crowd, and Alexander went along.  He led the way with a lighted torch in his hand, and the others followed, yelling and dancing.  When the rest of the Macedonians heard the noise and found out what was going on, they joined in.   They hoped that by burning the palace of the monarch of Persia, Alexander would clearly indicate his intention to return to Macedonia instead of settling among the barbarians.  However, after the fire had burned for a while, Alexander gave orders to put it out.

Of all the things that Alexander won from Darius, the most precious was an exquisite box.  He asked his friends what treasure he should keep in it.  There were various suggestions, and good arguments why each was the most precious thing that he owned, but Alexander finally declared that the honor would not go to any of these but to his annotated copy of the Iliad.

Among the presents that he sent back to Greece, a huge quantity of frankincense and myrrh went to his tutor, Leonidas.  The reason for this gift was that one day, when Alexander was still a boy, Leonidas had told him not to use so much of these spices in the sacrifice he was performing, saying: "When you have conquered the countries where these things grow, then you may be more liberal, but for now do not waste the little that we have."  Alexander sent the following note with the gift: "We send you plenty of frankincense and myrrh so that in the future you will not be a niggard to the gods."

Alexander's natural generosity increased along with his wealth, and he gave with the grace that makes a gift really appreciated.  For example, Ariston had killed an enemy, and as he showed Alexander the head to prove it, he mentioned that the customary reward for such a service in his country was a gold cup.   Alexander smiled and said: "Yes, an empty one.  But here is one full of good wine, and a toast to your good service and friendship."

Another time, one of the common soldiers was driving a mule that carried some of Alexander's treasure.  The mule was too exhausted to go on, so the soldier put the load on his own shoulders.  Alexander saw the man staggering along, and he asked what the matter was.  The soldier told him that the mule was too tired to carry the load, and that he was about at the end of his endurance too.  "Don't give up now," said Alexander, "but carry what you have there to the end of the journey, then take it to your own tent, to keep for yourself."

Alexander was always more displeased with those who refused his generosity than with those who abused it. 

His mother, Olympias, wrote to Alexander often, and she repeatedly advised him not to make his friends so rich that they would become kings themselves, with the power to buy their own retinue, while Alexander became poor and weak through his generosity.   Alexander sent his mother many presents, and stayed in close touch with her, but he declined to follow her advice.  This made Olympias angry, and Alexander patiently endured her wrath.  Olympias also tried to meddle in the government of Macedonia, and he bore with this as well.  Antipater, his governor in Macedonia, wrote Alexander a long letter full of grievances against Olympias, and Alexander said to his friends: "Antipater does not realize that one tear of a mother erases ten thousand letters like this."

After covering four hundred miles in eleven days to track down Darius , Alexander and his soldiers were nearly dead from thirst.  Some Macedonian scouts had brought back a few bags of water from a distant river, and they offered Alexander a helmet-full.  Although his mouth was so dry that he nearly was choking, he gave back the helmet with his thanks and explained: "There is not enough for everyone, and if I drink, the others will faint."  When his men saw this, they spurred their horses forward and shouted for him to lead them.  With such a king, they said, they would defy any hardships.

News came that one Bessus had betrayed Darius and made him a prisoner in his own camp.  Alexander moved on at a furious pace, and no more than 160 of his horsemen could keep up with him.  When they got to the camp, they found that Bessus had left Darius to die.  Darius was barely alive, and as he died he told one of Alexander's men that it was the culmination of all of his bad luck not to be able to live long enough to pay back Alexander for the courtesy he had shown to his mother, wife, and children.  Darius died before Alexander could get to see him [July 330 B.C.]. Alexander put his own cloak over Darius and sincerely lamented his death.   The body was sent to Darius' mother for an honorable funeral, suitable to his rank.   The reward of the traitor Bessus was to be torn apart by bent trees.

Alexander continued into Bactria and conquered it [328 B.C.].  There, among the captives, he saw Roxane, the daughter of the king.   It was true love at first sight, and Alexander married her.  Instead of taking Roxane by force, Alexander went through all of the Bactrian ceremonies for an official marriage.  This demonstration of his self-control and respect for their culture endeared him to the barbarians.

These two philosophers, Anaxarchus and Callisthenes, warred over the soul of Alexander.  The flatterers and parasites around Alexander already hated Callistenes because of his popularity with both the young soldiers and the old.  The old men admired Callisthenes for his simple life and contentment, and the young men for his eloquence.  His detractors said that Callisthenes seemed to have an attitude of superiority.  When he was invited to a party, most of the time he would not come.  If he did, he would usually sit silently as if he disapproved of what was going on.

One night Callisthenes was present where a large crowd had been invited to dine with Alexander.  When the cup was passed to Callisthenes, he was called upon to make an extemporaneous oration in praise of the Macedonians.  Callisthenes spoke with such eloquence that everyone present gave him a standing ovation and threw flowers.  Alexander remarked that it was easy to be eloquent on such a good subject, and he gave Callisthenes a greater challenge: to speak about the faults of the Macedonians, so they might all learn to be better in the future. 

It was truly said by Aristotle that Callisthenes was a powerful speaker, but he had bad judgment.  Callisthenes did so well at describing the faults of the Macedonians that they all hated him from then on.  Some say that Callisthenes died in prison after seven months in chains; others say that he was hanged.

Alexander wanted to invade India, but his soldiers were so burdened with booty that they moved very slowly on the march.  One day, at dawn, after all of the wagons were loaded, Alexander set fire to his own and to those of his friends.  Then he commanded the rest of the army to burn their wagons too.   By now, Alexander had become very severe and pitiless in punishing any disobedience.  Although a few were unhappy, most of the army was glad to see this barbaric baggage burn away so that they could be warriors again.

King of Taxila ruled a large area in India.  When he heard that Alexander was coming, Taxiles did not wait, but went in person to meet him in peace.  "Why should we make war on each other," Taxiles said, "if the reason for your coming is not to rob us of our water and our food?  Those are the only things that a wise man has no choice but to fight for.  As for any other riches or possessions, if I have more than you I am ready to share.  But if fortune has been better to you than to me, then I have no objection to being in your debt."

These courteous words pleased Alexander and he replied: "Do you think your kind words and courteous conduct will avoid a contest between us?  No, I will not let you off so easily.  I will do battle with you on these terms: no matter how much you give me, I will give more in return."   Thereupon Taxiles made many fine presents to Alexander, but Alexander responded with presents of even greater value and topped them off with a thousand talents in gold coins.  This generosity displeased Alexander's old friends but won the hearts of many of the Indians.

King Porus, however, refused to submit, and he took up a position to prevent Alexander from crossing the Hydaspes River.  Porus was a huge man, and when mounted on his war elephant he looked in the same proportion as an ordinary man on a horse.  After a long fight, Alexander won the victory, and Porus came to him as a prisoner.  Alexander asked him how he expected to be treated, and Porus replied: "As a king."  When Alexander asked a second time, Porus explained that in those words was included everything that a man could possibly want.   Alexander not only allowed Porus to keep his kingdom as a satrap, but he also gave him more territory.

 This was a costly victory, however.  Many Macedonians died, and so did Alexander's old war horse, Bucephalus.  This grieved Alexander so much that it seemed as though he had lost an old friend.  On that spot he ordered a city to be built, named Bucephalia.

Such a difficult victory over only 22,000 Indians [May 326 B.C.] took the edge off the courage of the Macedonians. They had no enthusiasm for Alexander's proposed crossing of the Ganges, a river said to be four miles wide and six hundred feet deep, to encounter an army on the other side consisting of 200,000 infantry, 80,000 cavalry, 8,000 chariots, and 6,000 war elephants.  Alexander was so angry at their reluctance that he shut himself up in his tent, saying that if they would not cross the Ganges, he owed them no thanks for anything they had done so far.  But finally the persuasions of his friends, and the pleas of his soldiers, got Alexander to agree to turn back.

To exaggerate his reputation, Alexander left bridles and armor that were much bigger than normal and huge altars to the gods.  On a flotilla of rafts and barges, Alexander's army floated down the Indus River. 

Along the way, they stopped to take some fortified cities, and at one of them Alexander came very close to losing his life.  Alexander was the first one up the ladders onto the wall of the city of the Mallians, and then he jumped down into the town with only two of his guards behind him. Before the rest of the Macedonians could catch up and save him, Alexander had taken an arrow in the ribs and had been knocked dizzy by a club.  He was unconscious when they carried him away, and he fainted when the doctors cut out the arrow.  Rumors spread that Alexander was dead.

 While in India, Alexander took ten of the Brahmins 19  prisoner.  These men had a great reputation for intelligence, so Alexander decided to give them a test.  He announced that the one who gave the worst answer would be the first to die, and he made the oldest Brahmin the judge of the competition.

Which are more numerous, Alexander asked the first one, the living or the dead?  "The living," said the Brahmin, "because the dead no longer count."

Which produces more creatures, the sea or the land? Alexander asked the second.  "The land," was his answer, "because the sea is only a part of it."

The third was asked which animal was the smartest of all, and the Brahmin replied: "The one we have not found yet."

Alexander asked the fourth what argument he had used to stir up the Indians to fight, and he answered:  "Only that one should either live nobly or die nobly."

Which is older: day or night? was Alexander's question to the fifth, and the answer he got was:  "Day is older, by one day at least."  When he saw that Alexander was not satisfied with this answer, the Brahmin added: "Strange questions get strange answers."

What should a man do to make himself loved? asked Alexander, and the sixth Brahmin replied: "Be powerful without being frightening."

What does a man have to do to become a god? he asked the seventh, who responded: "Do what is impossible for a man."

The question to the eighth was whether death or life was stronger, and his answer: "Life is stronger than death, because it bears so many miseries."

The ninth Brahmin was asked how long it was proper for a man to live, and he said: "Until it seems better to die."

Then Alexander turned to the judge, who decided that each one had answered worse than another.  "You will die first, then, for giving such a decision," said Alexander.  "Not so, mighty king," said the Brahmin, "if you want to remain a man of your word.  You said that you would kill first the one who made the worst answer."  Alexander gave all of the Brahmins presents and set them free, even though they had persuaded the Indians to fight him.

One of the strangest among all the exotic phenomena that Alexander's arm encountered in India was the ascetic life-style.  Indain holy men were regarded as both holy and wise} who engaged in intentional self-mortifications, and received respect and deference from their fellow-citizens as a consequence, had no real counterparts in the Greek world.

The earliest attested conversation between a Greek and an Indian holy man was described in a book by Onesikritos, the pilot of Alexander's fleet. Alexander had heard reports that Indian holy men went about naked, bore hardships cheerfully and as a result enjoyed great social prestige. Apparently always interested in the customs of the peoples he conquered, Alexander dispatched Onesikritos to make contact with some Indians of this type. Just outside the city of Takshila he encountered fifteen holy men standing, sitting or lying in various positions which they maintained without moving until nightfall. He invited them to an audience with Alexander; but with one exception - the man whom the Greeks called Kalanos - they declined, saying that whoever wished to learn about their doctrines should come to them.

Obviously the Indian holy man impressed the Greeks favorably by his overt indifference to worldly power and goods. Ordered to appear before Alexander upon the promise of gifts if he complied but punishment if he did not, Dandamis replied that he desired nothing at all and did not fear the king's power. Alexander allegedly was not offended by this answer, but praised Dandamis' attitude and refrained from insisting that he come.

The Brahmin Dandamis appears as a sharp critic of the Greeks' mode of life. He advocates a simple existence which ignores the refinements of civilization: thus the sage should be free from every desire which is not absolutely required by nature. He tells Alexander:

I have just as much of the earth as you and every other person; even if you gain all rivers, you cannot drink more than I. Therefore I have no fears, acquire no wounds and destroy no cities. I have just as much earth and water as you; altogether I possess everything. Learn this wisdom from me: wish for nothing, and everything is yours.

Among the defects of the Greeks' life-style Dandamis cites the wearing of clothes, meat-eating, drunkenness, carousing, avarice, wastefulness, war, and the subjugation of foreign peoples. He exhorts Alexander to renounce his bloody career and live in solitude like a sage. The king agrees as to the desirability of such a life. Unfortunately, he argues, his ties to his soldiers are too strong; for this reason he cannot renounce the world. Thereby even Alexander, the world-conqueror, accepts the moral superiority of asceticism.

Alexander's voyage down the Indus took seven months.   When he finally arrived at the Indian Ocean, he decided not to take the army home by ship but to march them through the Gedrosian Desert. 20    After sixty miserable days, they arrived at Gedrosia, where they finally found enough to eat and drink.  Many died in that desert: out of the 120,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry that Alexander took with him into India, only one in four came back.

But still Alexander wanted to go on to new adventures.  This time, he proposed to sail around Africa to the Pillars of Hercules [Gibraltar].

The tomb of Cyrus had been looted by one of the Macedonians, and for this Alexander ordered the grave-robber executed.  The inscription on the tomb was: "Whoever you are, and wherever you come from (for I know that you will come), I am Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire.  Please let me keep this dirt that covers my corpse."  It greatly disturbed Alexander to see by this example how fragile human fame could be.

At the same time, Calanus (one of the Brahmins who had accompanied Alexander back from India) asked that a funeral pyre be built for him.   Once everything was ready, Calanus did the customary ceremonies for a funeral, then said goodbye to his Macedonian friends.  He told them to tell Alexander that Calanus would be seeing him in Babylon soon.  Then he climbed on the pyre, lit it, and stayed perfectly still until he was ashes.

At Susa [324 B.C.], Alexander took Statira, the daughter of King Darius, as another wife.  At the same time, he married the best-bred ladies of Persia to his friends.   These marriages were jointly celebrated by a magnificent festival for nine thousand guests, each of whom got a gold wine-cup.  Alexander also paid off all of the debts of his soldiers, which took 10,000 talents.

When he had left for India, Alexander had put 30,000 Persian boys into Greek military training, and by now they had developed into strong and expert fighters.  They put on a demonstration of their military exercises, which pleased him, but depressed the Macedonians, who now believed that Alexander had no more use for them.

His culminating diplomacy was his announcement of his own divinity. In 324 he sent word to all the Greek states except Macedonia that he wished hereafter to be publicly recognized as the son of Zeua-Ammon. Even the obstinate Spartans agreed, saying, “let Alexander be a god if he wants to.” Perhaps he thought to overcome the disruptive diversity of faiths in his empire by providing, in his own person, the beginning of a sacred myth and a common unifying faith.

When Alexander allowed some of the sick and wounded to return to Macedonia, the other Greeks asked to leave too.  They added that Alexander no longer needed their services, now that he had such a fine bunch of Persian dancing boys, with which he could go on to conquer the world.  This infuriated Alexander, and after a long and abusive tirade he fired all of his guards and replaced them with Persians.  Not long afterwards, the Greeks repented.  They stood outside Alexander's tent for two days and nights until he finally relented and sent them back with rewards for their services.

Alexander continued on to Ecbatana, where he took care of some business of his empire and then relaxed and enjoyed himself with public spectacles.  Three thousand actors and artists had just arrived from Greece to amuse him.  But Alexander's happiness did not last long, because his best friend, Hephaestion, died of a fever.

Alexander drank heavily, and he caught a fever. After suffering for twelve days, he died in Babylon [June 10, 323 BC]

Soon Greek democracy would become corrupt and incompetent and would die. But when it was dead men realized how beautiful its heyday had been; and all later generations of antiquity looked back to the centuries of Pericles, Plato and Alexander as the zenith of Greece, and of all history.

                               CHAPTER XI

KNOW THYSELF – JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S WAY AND  SOPHOCLES’ WAY

                   

                          

                     Joseph Campbell: 1904-1987

Joseph John Campbell, an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: "Follow your bliss. Listen to him.

There are two kinds of gods: there are the gods such as Indra or lot, and then there are the Brahmins. Brahmins are on the top of the universe; indeed, the human beings are on the top of the universe. There is not a power in the world greater then a fulfilled, noble human being.

 

Hearken men, my brothers:

      Man is the truth above all truths;

      There is nothing above that!

 

"Furthermo­re, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have done before us, the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abominatio­n, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

 

Ophy – or discrimination – (viveka) consists in distinguishing between the subject and the object of knowledge: I am not my body, I am the knower of my body; I am not my emotions, I am the knower of my emotions; I am not my thoughts, I am knower of my thoughts; I am not my ideals and purposes, I am knower of these. In this way you drive yourself out the back of the wall, so to say.  Through this form of contemplation, you separate yourself from the world of phenomena. The Buddha went one step further: he said there is no subject  of knowledge; you are not that either. Thus you are deprived of every image of yourself, you are beyond all imaging. That is the philosophical form of yoga. In Sanskrit, this is called jnana yoga.

 

What  is the function of the body? The function of the body is to put your jiva, your deathless soul, into the realm of temporal experience. The body is meant to stimulate the soul with challenges, and then, once the jiva has assimilated the possibilities inherent in the experiences of this lifetime, the body is flung away and another body is taken on. The soul is ready for a certain type of experience, so it will be born into a family that will provide those experiences.

 

Now, individual soul may resist these experiences, in which case it fails to benefit from this lifetime. In this case, the soul is thrown right back like an undersized fish until the soul has learnt the lesson. The ultimate goal for the soul is to reach the point where it does not need to put on a body anymore. It is released, to be not anybody, anything – to become one with the light.

 

What is that brings the soul back, putting on bodies like a shopper at Macy’s trying on scarves? It is desire and fear. You have a desire for life; you have a fear of death. When you absolutely quench desire and fear, those things by which all of us live, then there is no life. That is the ultimate aim of all the yogas.

 

Nirvana literally means “blown out”; the image is that once one has realized one’s unity with what is called Brahman then one’s individual ego is extinguished like a candle flam, and one becomes one with the great solar light.

 

But when you get over there, you realize, I was here all the time. That’s is all, folks; we’re there, and there is no place to go, and this is, basically, it. As Dr. daisetz Suzuki, the Japanese Zen master, once said, “This world – with all its faults, all its crime, all its horror, all its banality, all its stupidity – is the golden lotus world.” But you have to learn to see it in that dimension.

 

There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river; one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness. So, finally the lower chakras are the same. This gives a kind of violence and power to Indian mysticism and spirituality that is a bit horrifying.  

 

“The third eye” of inner sight perceives the ultimate vision of the Lord of the World, that human form of the divine that transcends the human. Here the divine being is made manifest, so to say, in one’s own image.

 

When Krishna appears to Arjuna as the world devourer, the point is – among other points – that we are all that kala, with all that life and death immanent inside us. Krishna gives instructions of how to act when in possession of this knowledge, and here’s the formula: act without fear or desire either for the fruits of action. Act without fear or desire for yourself or others but simply proceed in the order of life. In the ultimate illumination, all pairs of opposite are transcended, are left behind. Act in the knowledge that this world as we know and experience it is the perfect lotus world – this is nirvana. The actions we take, whatever they are, are the actions of the divine power.

This can be carried one step further, as is always in Indian mystic thought: the actions of lust, the actions of pleasure are also yoga. The whole world as it lives is a manifestation of this radiant mystery, and we do not see it.

One of the most impressive and wondrous things about the Oriental religions is the concept of the round of existence, these ions that come and go so that worlds come into being and worlds go out of being.

The goal of various forms of yoga is to go into a realm of undifferentiated consciousness while remaining awake.

In the East, everybody is true God and true Man. And the whole goal of the religion is to realize that divinity in yourself.

You cannot say a thing either is or is not. The things are no things, there is nothing there. Here, below, all things are dual. This line is the mystery of maya.

For the Buddhists it does not matter whether the Buddha actually lived or not – one need not have faith in his life as a historical fact, as a Christian is supposed to believe in Christ. For the Christian it makes a difference whether the savior did actually live, but for the Buddhist, the Buddha, whether he is a mythological image or a fact, is a rendition of the mystery of Buddhahood in life, and he does not have to be have been there at all for you to find the Buddhahood in yourself. He can serve just as mythological figure, as a shadow on the wall, as an inspiration to you to find it in yourself, and then you are in. You become one with the eternal, the source of being.

In Freudia, the ego is split and the “I want,” the id, is subjugated to the moderation of ego. That is to say, we ask the individual to develop a creative, critical, self-responsible personality. “Billy, do you want ice cream or cake, do you want chocolate or vanilla? Make up your mind. Johnny you want to marry Susan or Betty? Make up your mind.” Not so in the orient: you get the chocolate ice cream – whether you like it or not – and you marry Betty – and you never saw her before. There is absolutely no development of the critical personality. The ideal is that there is nobody there but the tradition is coming through, coming through, coming through without alteration.

Now this process of living your duty goes by a name we will recognize; dharma. This is the key word of Hinduism. It is from a Sanskrit root. You perform your duty and so support the universe. The universe is alive. The Sun performs its duty, the Moon performs its duty, the mice perform their duty; the cats perform theirs, the Brahmins perform theirs, the sudras perform theirs, and by this – everyone performing his duty – the universe is held in form. By following your dharma, you hold the universe in form.

 The word for truth is satya. A person who performs his duty is something. Sat: he is. The feminine form of sat is sati. You achieve your character by doing as your dharma demands, not by deciding what you want to doo or what you think would be proper to do. It can be said that all of Indian life is an act of sati.

A story from third century B.C. during the reign of Emperor Asoka gives a sense of this. One year, the monsoons were particularly heavy, and the Ganges was rising and threatening to flood the capital city of Pataliputra, which is now called Patna.

As it approached the level of great danger, Asoka called out, “Is there nobody here who can perform an Act of Truth and cause the waters of the Ganges to flow back upstream?” None could.

 Way down the line was an old prostitute, Bindumati, who said, “I have an act of truth.” She drew herself inward and in her own soul pronounced the Act of Truth, and the river indeed began to flow back upstream.

 The emperor calls her a string of names: “You despicable, loathsome, old whore, you mean to say you have an Act of Truth?”

 Quite calmly and humble she responds, “I have an act of Truth that would turn the world of the gods upside down if I wanted it to.”

 Somewhat intimidated, the emperor says, “What is your Act of Truth?” Bindumati says, “In the performance of my duty, I have not fawned on the wealthy, the handsome, or those of high caste, nor despised the poor, the lowly, and the ugly, but have always given due service for the money. Let the waters flow back upstream.” And so the river had flown at her command since she was pure dharma. Sati: she was.

 This is something to remember with respect to the caste system. By performing his duty no matter where, the individual participates in the glory and power of the universe and become a conduit of that power. Nobody chooses to do anything; everybody is doing what he ought, so this grand thing, the universe, spins on.

 Judge your life not in terms of what the other fellow’s getting but in terms of whether you’ re really doing it. This is the glory of India, it’s the thing that made it great once, and it’s the thing that’s supporting it in its horror now. So much then for the idea of sat, being something; you are something, insofar as you’re a social being by doing your job; and they do it, they do it well.

 There is another story to illustrate the relationship of ego to dharma. It concerns a student who was late one day. The teacher says, “you are late. Where have you been?”

 “Well”, the student says, “I live in the other side of the river. The river was flooded, there was no ferry, the ford was too deep, and so I could not get here.”                            

“Well”, says the teacher, “you are here now. Did the ferry come? Did the river come down?”

 The student shakes his head. “No, nothing changed on the river.”

 “Well, how did you get here?”

 The student says, “I thought of my teacher. I thought, my teacher is the vehicle of truth to me, he is my god, he is my oracle, I will think about my teacher and I’ll walk across the water, and so I did. I thought, Guru, guru, guru, and I walked across the flood. Here I am.”

 When the student goes, the teacher thinks this was in him. He says, “I’ll go to try this thing. I’ve got to see how this works.” So he looks around to see if anybody’s watching. When he is sure he is alone, he goes down to the water, and looks at the rushing torrent. He thinks, I’m going to do it. He thinks, I, I, I. He steps out on the river . . . and sinks like a stone.

The only reason one can walk across water is that there is nobody there; one is pure spirit, spiritus, wind. That teacher in the student’s mind was a communicator of truth. In his own mind he was an “I”. And an “I” has weight and sinks.

So the first thing to understand about Hinduism and individual is caste and the idea of Dharma, of living one’s duty.

 The illuminated man looks like a man but there is nobody there, there is absolute egolessness. When you have achieved that realization, it is called release, Moksha. Buddhists call this place of release nirvana - where winds do not blow.

Sophocles’ Way

Sophocles was the second of the 3 greatest Greek writers of tragedy (with Aeschylus and Euripides). He is known for writing about Oedipus, the mythological figure who proved central to Freud and the history of psychoanalysis. Sophocles lived through most of the 5th century, experiencing the Age of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War.

"Know Thyself" is sage advice. "All Things in Moderation" is also a wise saying. King Oedipus, subject of the most tragic story ever written, brought about his own downfall because of his excessive obsession to know himself. And, try as he might, the more he tried to escape his tragic Fate, the closer it got...

Thus, some say that the moral of the story is, even if you try to thwart your destiny, you won't succeed. The concept of predestination plays a large role here. For example, if the gods know what will happen, and events are pre-ordained, how can people make free choices or have any semblance of free will? If the gods put challenges in our way that we fail to rise to, are we responsible for the consequences? Would knowing the future, as Oedipus does, cause us to act or behave any differently?

The ancient scribe Sophocles wrote "Oedipus the King" (between 441-427 B.C.E.) for the annual festival where playwrights competed for prizes. These festivals were major civic occasions, with attendance expected of all noted writers. In his play Sophocles goes out of his way to present Oedipus as an extremely capable, beloved ruler. It should be noted that Sophocles never suggests that Oedipus has brought his destiny on himself by any "ungodly pride" or "tragic flaw", common themes in Greek tragedies. Sophocles also makes a special effort to explain that Oedipus killed King Laius in self-defense, and a major theme in the tragic play is whether one can believe in oracles and seers.

The title of the play, from which is derived the story, is often given in its Latin translation ("Oedipus Rex"), rather than in its original Greek ("Oedipus Tyranneus"), since the Greek term for king is the English "tyrant", which means a monarch who rules without the consent of the people.

Laius and his wife Jocasta (or Iocasta) were King and Queen of Thebes, a prosperous and famous city state in ancient Greece. King Laius, as many people did those days, consulted Apollo's revered oracle of Delphi for advice and to find out what the future held for him.

What the oracle announced shocked the royal couple -- The Delphic oracle said that the King's son would grow up and kill him! To make matters worse, it was prophesized that the son would marry his mother and produce offspring by her. King Laius and Queen Jocasta were understandably aghast!

A short time later Queen Jocasta became pregnant and gave birth to a darling little baby boy. Remembering with fear the oracle of Delphi's words, the royal couple of Thebes had the infant's feet pierced and tied together -- that's the meaning of the name Oedipus, "swollen feet".

Laius and Jocasta knew that their baby son had to be destroyed, but they didn't have the heart to do so themselves. They instructed their most trusted slave to expose the hapless baby on Mount Cithaeron, a wild and beast-filled place where the infant surely would perish. In those days, it was usual to leave an unwanted or defective baby in the wilderness.

However, the slave glanced down at the innocent child and took pity on it. Knowing that the royal couple of the nearby city state of Corinth was childless, and desperately desired a son, the slave left the crying infant, its feet still pierced and bound by a pin, in a place sure to be found.

Sure enough, a kindly shepherd discovered the baby and brought the foundling for adoption to King Polibus and Queen Merope of Corinth.

Oedipus was raised as a son by Polibus and Merope and grew to be a handsome, clever and brave young man, even though he walked with a slight limp from the wounds he suffered when his real parents pierced his feet. One day, while playing with his adolescent friends, he got into an argument with them. They insisted, as mean children sometimes do, that he was a fake son, and not the real child of Polibus and Merope.

When Oedipus confronted his "parents" about this, they denied that he was adopted and swore that he was their legitimate child. They told Oedipus to forget what the mean kids had said, but now he was intrigued.

To discover the truth for himself, Oedipus journeyed to Delphi and asked of the oracle, "Who am I?" The oracle, cryptic as always, replied: "You are the man who will kill his father and breed children by his mother."

Confused and devastated, the young man started to head back home. Nearing the crossroad, Oedipus decided never to return to Corinth and go to Thebes instead. He dearly loved his parents and thought that by never returning home he would keep them safe and thus overcome his Fate according to Apollo's oracle.

As he was approaching the crossroad between Delphi, Thebes and Corinth, distraught and deep in thought, Oedipus came upon an old man in a chariot, escorted by a few attendants. It was a narrow passage between two rocks and hard to navigate safely. The crabby old man in the chariot shouted: "Get lost! Go away! Get off this road!” striking Oedipus with his long scepter. Adding further injury, the rude, regal old man ran over the young man's sore foot with his chariot wheel.

Oedipus angrily grabbed the staff from his tormentor's hands and hit him on the head, killing the old man. The same fate befell the attendants, who tried to attack and arrest Oedipus - he valiantly fought and killed them too, save for one servant, who ran away in panic when the battle broke out.

Hey, he just wanted to cross the narrow passage, that's all! Besides, Oedipus was simply defending himself, and he got there first!

Little did Oedipus suspect that the old man he had just slain was his own father, and that the first part of the oracle's prophecy had come true...

RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

No sooner had he disposed of these bad people, Oedipus came face to face with the Sphinx, sitting on her rock at the crossroad. This creature, a winged lion with the head of a woman, had taken up residence outside of the city of Thebes and was terrorizing the populace.

Anybody who passed by the monster was asked this riddle by her: 

Who in the morning walks on four legs, at midday on two, and in the evening on three?

Her rock and lair was surrounded with a pile of human bones, for the Sphinx ate those who could not answer the riddle. Yet Oedipus was wise and not about to be devoured by a foul-smelling monster. He replied that the answer is Man: Crawling on all fours as a baby; walking on two legs as an adult; and as an old man, leaning on a cane.

The riddle was solved and the Sphinx had to throw herself down from the cliff to her doom. The road to Thebes was now free of terror.

Having rid the city of Thebes from this monster with her ridiculous riddle, brave Oedipus was welcomed as a hero by the people

 

The citizens informed him that their king, Laius, just recently was killed in a highway robbery on his way to Delphi, where he had traveled to ask the oracle how best to get rid of the Sphinx.

With the death of Laius the Theban throne was left conveniently empty, and the widowed queen Jocasta was still very attractive. The young stranger seemed to be of noble birth, was obviously quite intelligent and probably would make a good king, thought the people of Thebes. The grateful citizens offered Oedipus the throne together with the queen Jocasta, who was not reluctant to marry this young handsome hero.

For years Oedipus and Jocasta ruled wisely and lived happily, and their marriage produced four children: the twin brothers, Eteocles & Polyneices, and two girls, Antigone and Ismene.

 

OEDIPUS REX (OEDIPUS THE KING)

All was well, till, many years later; a horrific plague suddenly struck the city of Thebes, decimating the populace. Plants, animals, and people were all dying. A huge crowd of people came to the king's palace to beg Oedipus do something and help Thebes, just as he had when he slew the Sphinx. After all, this was why he had been chosen as their king, to save them in times of crisis.

Oedipus was a decent ruler who cared deeply for his people. Unsure of what to do, he sent Creon, brother of Jocosta, to ask the oracle of Delphi as to the cause of the plague, and how to eliminate it. Oedipus told the crowd that Creon was late returning, but as soon as he got back, Oedipus promised to do whatever the oracle said.

Just then, Creon arrived. Since he bore good news, he was wearing laurel leaves with berries around his head. Announcing "All's well that ends well", Creon said that Apollo's oracle claimed that the killer of Laius must be found and banished, and then the plague of Thebes would end. Apollo himself had promised that a diligent investigation would reveal the murderer.

Oedipus was quite shocked at such negligence, not yet realizing that it was he who unwittingly had slain king Laius, his own father.

"How it is possible no investigation of the circumstances of Laius' death was ever carried out?" he asked.

"Well," the people explained, "it was a hard time for us all; this monster Sphinx had us terrified, you know...everything happened so suddenly, the king was murdered, and then you appeared in our city and we were busy with your coronation...

"There really was no clue as to the perpetrator; just one survivor remained from the massacre and he was out of his wits from fear. Now he is a very old man, you know...When you came to the city, he abruptly left for his hut in the mountains and has never since returned."

"Send for him at once!" said Oedipus.

Oedipus proceeded to put a formal curse on the murderer of the old king, whoever he was. No citizen anywhere was allowed to give him shelter, food or hospitality. Ironically, Oedipus assured the people that he would do everything within his powers to avenge the death of the old king, just as if the late king were his own father.

Further, whoever came forward with information about the murder of Laius would be richly rewarded, and if the killer himself confessed, he would not be punished beyond having to leave the city permanently. On the other hand, if anyone concealed the killer, Oedipus said that he would be cursed and punished.

Next, Oedipus decided to consult the famous blind prophet, Teiresias, in hope to find out the divine truth. This respected seer advised Oedipus to forget this matter, to never even try to discover the murderer.

"For your own good, don't ask me of anything!" Teiresias beseeched the king. At this, Oedipus became angry and accused Teiresias of being a false prophet, or, worse yet, a conspirator with murderers.

It was the old prophet's turn to get angry. Informing Oedipus that he is far too young to speak to him in that fashion, Teiresias told the king that "before the sun is down, you will find out yourself a husband and a son and brother of your children."

Hearing the men's shouts, queen Jocasta came out from the palace to find Oedipus bewildered and perplexed. He proceeded to tell his wife about the crazy blind prophet. Jocasta begged her husband to ignore the seer's words, for they were filled with lies.

Jocasta then told Oedipus how, in her youth, an oracle had told her and Laius that he would be killed by his own son. She told how the baby son had been left to die in the mountains, and how Laius had been killed by robbers at a crossroad...so much for the oracles, said Jocasta, witness how wrong they could be...

Rather than comforting Oedipus, her words began to worry him and to plant some seeds of doubt in his mind. He began asking all sorts of questions from his wife: Where did the murder occur? Which crossroad? How long before he had arrived to Thebes? What did Laius look like?

"Tall, a little gray in his hair, and you know something, he looked a lot like you, but older," she replied.

With each answer, his mood grew darker. The queen's description evoked the memory of his encounter with the old man in the chariot, whom he had left dead on the crossroad. Could this be Laius? The course of what the ancient poets called peripeteia (turn of events) triggered the mechanisms of anagnorisis (realization).

GREEK TRAGEDY!

At that crucial moment, a messenger from Corinth arrived with good and bad news: The bad - Oedipus' old father, King Polybus of Corinth, was dead; The good - the city of Corinth expected Oedipus to return and be their king.

Oedipus was cautious of the news, hesitant to return to Corinth: He spoke how in his youth the Delphic oracle had warned him that he would kill his father and marry his mother, and that he had decided never to return home, lest somehow the prophecy came true.

Oedipus was anxious to go and see his mother while she was still alive, but as long as she lived, he still feared the woeful prophecy.

The messenger then dropped the bomb on him -- He informed Oedipus that Queen Merope of Corinth was not his real mother and that he was adopted as a baby. When Oedipus pressed him for details on how he knew this, the messenger replied that he was the one who had delivered him to his royal parents. He had gotten him from some shepherd who had found him wailing, with his feet pierced and bound, way up on Mount Cithaeron.

Hearing this, Jocasta turned pale and nearly fainted. She quietly implored Oedipus to cease his investigations regarding his heritage. She now realized everything, including the fact that she had married her own son, and was aghast at the turn of events. Oedipus, on the other hand, suspected that he was the one who killed king Laius, but hadn't yet realized that the victim was his real father.

Oedipus was determined to "know thyself" and was eager to unearth the truth regardless of the price.

Just then the messenger from Corinth saw the old Shepherd approaching and recognized the man as the one who years ago had given him the baby boy.

"Hey, remember me, I'm the one you gave the abandoned baby!" he shouted, but the old shepherd pretended to not recall the incident. He plead forgetfulness and implored Oedipus to let him go.

Nothing doing -- the king was determined to learn the truth.

Indeed the identity of the baby was established, but the question still remained as to whose baby it was. Pressed for answers, the shepherd finally revealed the fact that the baby was the son of Laius and Jocasta:

"And if you are this baby," he said to Oedipus, "then you are definitely the most wretched man who ever lived."

Only then came the full anagnorisis (realization) of the tragedy. Not only had Oedipus killed his own father, but he unknowingly had wed his mother and fathered children with her. The oracle's prophecy had come to pass.

From the palace emanated cries of anguish and woe -- Queen Jocasta was dying! She had hung herself in the very same bedroom that she had shared with father and son. With superhuman strength, Oedipus broke down her locked door. Rushing into her chambers, Oedipus found her lifeless body.

The horror. The horror...

Utterly distraught, he grabbed the pin from her dress and poked out his eyes, stabbing them again and again. Following all that his eyes had just seen, and realizing the atrocities he had unwittingly committed, Oedipus felt that he must never again see the light of the sun.

The god Apollo gave him the morbid strength to gouge his eyes out of their sockets, according to Oedipus. That's ironic, seeing as it was Apollo's oracles who had practically caused the entire tragedy in the first place, with their horrible prophecy...

And so he appeared, blind, at the entrance of the palace (anagnorisis ~ epiphany of the horror) begging to be shown the way to exile (catharsis, cleansing). Thus could the killer plague of Thebes be ended.

Oedipus' quest to know himself, and to investigate the death that he must avenge, led to his horrific downfall. Now Oedipus, at long last, knew himself; but the irony was that the knowledge of the self was only achieved by self-destruction.

Much as he tried, Oedipus could not out-maneuver his Fate...

DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

Now blind and truly wretched, Oedipus abandoned the throne of Thebes to Creon, the brother of the late queen, and went into self-imposed exile. His dutiful daughters, Antigone and Ismene, followed him to the end. Staff in hand, Oedipus himself was thus the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx.

    

             Blind Oedipus' Meeting with His Daughters

Athenian king Theseus, the hero who slew the Minotaur, offered refuge to Oedipus and the girls. Oedipus' death is a mystery, and his resting place will protect Athens (see Sophocles, Oedipus in Colonus). His daughters returned to Thebes, and Antigone made preparations to marry Haemon, son of Creon.

But a quarrel broke out between Eteocles and Polyneices, the twin sons of Oedipus. Eteocles exiled Polyneices, who then raised an army with seven prominent chieftains against his native Thebes (the famous war of Seven Against Thebes) in an attempt to regain power. The brothers proceeded to kill each other in combat.

The tragically empty throne was left to Creon, who became the new king. He ordered a funeral befitting a hero for Eteocles, defender of the city, while leaving the body of Polyneices out in the open air, forbidding anyone to bury him under severe punishment. Antigone, the sister of the deceased, could not bear to see her brother's corpse so dishonored and she secretly performed his funeral rites. King Creon, shocked by the disobedience of this young girl, his own niece and daughter-in-law-to-be, locked her in a cave to die, despite of the strenuous entreaties and protests of his son Haemon, Antigone's beloved fiancé. 

Warned by divine omens and the old prophet Teiresias, the king finally relented and ordered the cave to be opened. Alas, it was far too late, for Antigone had hanged herself with her girl's belt.

Could things get any more tragic? Yes indeed...Haemon, having found his bride dead, cursed his father, spat in his face and then killed himself in his presence.

Hearing this news, Creon's wife also killed herself, cursing her husband. So, Creon turned out to be as big an all-around loser as poor Oedipus.

What a tragedy! It's enough to give you a complex...

CHAPTER XII

                         WORDS OF THE WISE

1. "Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness." -- Napoleon Hill

 

2. "A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends." -- George Washington

 

3. "You're never too old to become younger." -- Mae West

 

4. Picturing the beauty in people is a powerful way to develop our compassion. It is more difficult to demonstrate kindness to others if we view them as being distinct from us. By making the effort to see that every one of us possesses beauty within; however, it becomes easier to give to other people. We see that we are all connected by the energy of our spirits, and our sense of separation dissolves. We become more thoughtful in our actions, because we begin to recognize that by treating others with kindness, we are doing the same for ourselves it is a shared relationship. By allowing yourself to see the beauty in the people you meet, you will spread an unlimited amount of kindness to others.

-- Daily Om

 

5. "This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men."-- Captain J. A. Hadfield.

 

6. Writing in a journal, meditating, studying the words of wise women and men, and engaging in other spiritual practices can help you make the most of this time. Making time to nurture your spirit may require that you sacrifice other, less vital activities. The more time you commit to soul-nurturing activities, the happier and more relaxed you will become. The time you devote to enriching your spirit will rejuvenate you and help you create a more restful life. – Om

 

7. By showing that we are willing to trust others we create space for greater intimacy in our relationships. It is common in our interactions to wait for the other person to take the first step in opening up to us. Sometimes our pride gets in the way and we are afraid to express our true feelings to our loved ones for fear of getting hurt. When we make the effort to let others know how we genuinely feel without sugarcoating our thoughts, however, we create a connection that is based on truth. We show others that we trust them enough to share our deeper feelings. Making yourself more accessible to your loved ones today will pave the way for more meaningful relationships in the future. -- Om

 

8. A smile directed at a stranger, a compliment given to a friend, an attitude of laughter, or a thoughtful gesture can send ripples that spread among your loved ones and associates, out into your community, and finally throughout the world. You have the power to touch the lives of everyone you come into contact with and everyone those people come into contact with. The momentum of your influence will grow as your ripples moves onward and outward. One of those ripples could become a tidal wave of love and kindness. -- Om

 

9. "Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children." -- Alex Haley

 

10. Mentally embracing others transmits our good wishes on a deeper level, in a way that mere words cannot, and it becomes easier to understand the true nature of our shared feelings. -- Om

 

11. We can begin to take ourselves less seriously and have more fun. Imperfection is inherent to being human. By embracing your imperfections, you embrace yourself. -- Om

 

12. "Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them, and you have their shoes." -- Frieda Norris

 

13. Acknowledging how close we all are, instead of clinging to what separates us, enables us to feel less alone in the world. Every person we meet, see, hear, or read about, is a member of our family. We are truly not alone. We also begin to see that we are perfectly capable of understanding and relating to people who, on the surface, may seem very different from us. This awareness prevents us from disconnecting from people on the other side of the tracks, and the other side of the world. We begin to understand that we must treat all people for what they are—family. -- Om

 

14. "There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow." -- O.S. Marden

 

15. To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfills its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All. - Rabindranath Tagore

 

16. Thinking about our childhood experiences allows us to realize not only their effect but also the ways in which they have helped us develop. It is easy to use these experiences to mask our actions. We might think that because something happened to us when we were young, we have free reign to continue to act in the same way. When you become aware of the positive effects of even your most painful experiences, however, you will recognize that you have grown in many ways and that today you are simply shaped by your past, not defined by it. -- Om

 

17. "You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try, and you don't take the risk." -- Rosalynn Carter

 

18. Showing our warmth for our loved ones opens the way for greater understanding, communication, and appreciation for everything they offer us. It can sometimes be hard to demonstrate our affection—we might think that it is simply understood that we love and care for each other. But we need words and actions to truly show the depth of our affection. If we don’t do give them, others may not be aware of the extent of our feelings. -- Om

19. "You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically – to say no to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger yes burning inside." -- Stephen Covey

 

20. Learning how to laugh allows us to fill our lives with joyfulness. The physical act of laughing enables us to open our breathing passages and let more oxygen into our system. Emotionally, it helps us release our stress and see the lighter side of life. By laughing for just a few minutes each day we connect to that part of our body and minds that is carefree and uninhibited. We become more open to the events of our lives, which makes it easier to share our acceptance of everything we come across as well as our joy with others. -- Om

 

21. Eventually, a river will empty into the sea. Water does not hold back from joining with a larger body, nor does it fear a loss of identity or control. It gracefully and humbly tumbles into the vastness by contributing its energy and merging without resistance. Each time we move beyond our individual egos to become part of something bigger, we can try our best to follow the lead of the river. -- Om

 

22. Accepting everything that we have been given helps us see that there is excitement in all facets of our lives, even in those facets that seem mundane. As we use our breath to quiet our minds and our minds to remind us of our abundance, we gain a realistic perspective about our lives. Seeing that not everything is perfect or exciting on the surface makes it easier to search for what is stimulating for us on a deeper and more meaningful level. By becoming aware of what you have, you will understand that your life is complete just as it is today. -- Om

 

23. "When you give your children knowledge, you are telling them what to think. When you give your children wisdom, you do not tell them what to know, or what is true, but, rather, how to get to their own truth." -- Neale Donald Walsch

 

24. There are many ways that you can serve the world. Imagine the impact we would have on the environment if we picked up one piece of trash off the street everyday and chose not to drive our car once a week. Even gardening tactics such as throwing wildflower seeds onto a vacant lot can brighten the lives of others – including the lives of birds and insects. Everyday, you can do something to make this world a better place. During meditation, ask for guidance on what you can do to be of service. This can be a wonderful way to start your day. Smiling at a stranger who looks down in the dumps or teaching your neighborhood kids how to whistle will impact someone’s day or even their life. Giving of yourself is the best gift that you can give. --Om

 

25. "There comes a time in your life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Forget the bad, and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right, pray for the ones who don't. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living." -- Unknown 

 

26. There are many ways to raise your vibration (creating your own Reality), from working with affirmations to visualizing enlightened entities during meditation. One of the most practical ways to raise your vibration is to consciously choose where you focus your attention. To understand how powerful this is, take five minutes to describe something you love unreservedly—a person, a movie, an experience. When your five minutes are up, you will noticeably feel more positive and even lighter. If you want to keep raising your vibration, you might want to commit to spending five minutes every day focusing on the good in your life. As you do this, you will train yourself to be more awake and alive. Over time, you will experience a permanent shift in your vibrancy. -- Om   

 

27. "Every time you take a risk or move out of your comfort zone, you have a great opportunity to learn more about yourself and your capacity."-- Jack Canfield  

 

28. "Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love."-- Mother Teresa

 

29. "Sometimes opportunities float right past your nose. Work hard, apply yourself, and be ready. When an opportunity" comes you can grab it." -- Julie Andrews

 

30. "You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space." -- Johnny Cash   

 

31. Visualizing yourself carrying your burdens to the feet of someone or something much bigger than you, can be a powerful daily practice. To begin, sit with your eyes closed and envision an all powerful, supremely comforting being in whatever form that takes for you, standing at the end of a road. See yourself carrying a large sack, box, or other container, imagining that all your worries are inside it. Watch as you make your way to the being of your choice, and lay your baggage down at their feet. Allow yourself to feel the lightness and relief of this action, express your gratitude, and surrender. You will be amazed by how this simple meditation can liberate you from a burden you were never meant to carry. -- Om

     

32. "Life is too short. Grudges are a waste of perfect happiness. Laugh when you can, apologize when you should and let go of what you can't change. Love deeply and forgive quickly. Take chances. Give everything and have no regrets. Life is too short to be unhappy. You have to take the good with the bad. Smile when you're sad, love what you got, and always remember what you had. Always forgive, but never forget. Learn from your mistakes but never regret. People change, and things go wrong but always remember... life goes on!" -- Author unknown

 

33. Most of the time, the attacks and criticisms of others have much more to do with them and how they are feeling than with us. If we get caught up in trying to adjust ourselves to other people’s negative energy, we lose touch with our core. In fact, in a positive light, these slings and arrows offer us the opportunity to strengthen our core sense of self, and to learn to dodge and deflect other people’s misdirected negativity. The more we do this, the more we are able to discern what belongs to us and what belongs to other people. With practice, we become masters of our energetic integrity, refusing to serve as targets for the disowned anger and frustration of the people around us. -- Om

34. "When you're happy for yourself, it fills you. When you're happy for someone else, it pours over." -- Sarah Addison Allen

35. "If I were given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself.". --            Charles Schulz

36. Focusing on our core not only helps us access our intuition, but it also helps us develop trust in ourselves. Our abdomen is the energy center that allows us to access the wisdom of our bodies—the proverbial "gut feeling" we have when we know that something is amiss. When we bring our attention to this area, we are able to garner information that is free from our minds' tendency to rationalize things. This leads us toward knowledge that is true about ourselves and others, and we gain a greater sense of trust in our feelings. By accessing your sixth sense, you will pick up on phenomenon in the world around you on a deeper level. -- Om

37. "A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: 'Duh.'"
-- Conan O'Brien

38. Becoming aware of our own defenses allows us to see how we can help others when they feel guarded. The defenses people use usually set off our own emotional reaction, particularly if it is a way that is familiar to us. Letting ourselves remember our own ways of functioning and the fears that made us put up our walls, however, gives us a way to empathize with another person rather than simply analyze their patterns. We learn to reach out with kindness and an open heart in order to help someone through their struggles. By understanding your own defenses today, you will be able to lower other people's guard and support their healing. -- Om

39. As we build a relationship with our power, and follow it, we begin to see that we don't always have to do what we're being asked to do by others, and we don't have to jump on every trend. All we have to do is have the confidence to listen to our own voice and let it guide us as we make our own decisions in life and remember the necessity for balance. -- Om 

40. If old friends come to mind or into your dreams, use their appearance as an excuse to get in touch. If an old song or movie reminds you of them, reach out to share the gift of renewed contact. Wherever you fall in the circle of connection and reconnection, be sure to look beyond the surprise of the moment to enjoy the deeper gift that this revelation brings. -- Om

42. Bearing this in mind, we have the opportunity to approach the world around us in a new way. There is never any reason to be bored at a party, or on the bus, or in a conversation with a stranger. When we retain the spark of curiosity and the warmth required to open someone up, we always have in front of us the makings of a great story. All we have to do is ask. -- Om

43. Human beings are very much like drops of water in an endless ocean. Our worth comes from our role as distinct individuals as well as our role as an integral part of something larger than ourselves. Simply awakening to this concept can help you rediscover the copious and awe-inspiring worth within each and every one of us.

44. "If I only had three words of advice, they would be, Tell the Truth. If I got three more words, I'd add, All the Time." -- Randy Pausch

45. Nearly every revolutionary change in the history of human progress came about because someone questioned some time-honored belief or tradition and in doing so revealed a new truth, a new way of doing things, or a new standard for ethical and moral behavior. Just so, a commitment to staying open and inquisitive in our own individual lives can lead us to new personal revolutions and truths, truths that we will hopefully, for the sake of our growth, remain open to questioning. -- Om

46. Doing activities that fully utilize all of our talents nurtures every aspect of our being. Many of us have numerous tasks we do because of our obligations and responsibilities. While we are able to complete these activities, they are not always things that stretch us beyond our limits. Knowing what we have a knack for motivates us to move in new directions and gives us the desire to develop ourselves. When we are engaged in our lives in this way, we are using everything that we have been given to bring joy and pleasure to our lives and the lives of those around us. -- Om

46. An important part of this process is looking at ourselves and noticing what kind of friend we are to the people in our lives. We might find that as we adjust our own approach to a relationship, challenging ourselves to be more supportive and positive, our friends make adjustments as well and the whole world benefits. -- Om

47. Traveling presents a wonderful opportunity to practice being open-minded and grounded. The voyages you make help cultivate a worldwide community in which we as humans can acknowledge and appreciate our differences as much as we recognize and appreciate our similarities. Though you will eventually return home, the positive impression you leave behind will remain as a testament to the respect and amicability that marked your intercultural interactions. -- Om

48. Laughter is good medicine, and we all have this medicine available to us whenever we recall a funny story or act in a silly way. We magnify the effects of this medicine when we share it with the people in our lives. If we are lucky, they will have something funny to share with us as well, and the life-loving sound of laughter will continue to roll out of our mouths and into the world. -- Om

49. "I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that's as unique as a fingerprint - and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you." -- Oprah Winfrey

50 Letters, which used to be somewhat common, are now rare. A handwritten letter makes a wonderful gift to be treasured always. You might simply send it or hand deliver it out of the blue. Whatever you choose, your letter will no doubt be received and treasured with a grateful heart. -- Om

51. Making time just for ourselves is a wonderful way to infuse our lives with revitalizing and creative energy. Our lethargy is often a signal that what we have to do in life either doesn't fully engage us or is so energetically consuming that we have nothing left of ourselves when we are done. Since we usually have to get our tasks

done, it is important for us to find a way to integrate the things that stimulate and pique our interest with the routine elements of our daily lives. By doing something that interests you, you will feed your soul and your tasks with the creativity that comes from doing what ignites your passion. -- Om

 

52. “Some kids do what you say. Some kids do what you say not to do. But all kids do what you do.” – Unknown

 

53. A thirteen-year-old was sent to the cleaners. She was told to go straight there; she did. But she did not come straight home. On the trip home from the cleaners, she became involved in an egg fight. More than a half dozen eggs ended up on a $300 suit. She took the suit home, rolled it up, put it in a plastic bag and hid it in the closet. Three days later when she was asked about the suit, she started to cry and produced the bag with the festering suit from the closet. The child is still alive with all of her limbs intact. The parent took a deep breath and reminded herself: There are times when I do not follow instructions; I do not always admit my mistakes and I try to cover them up. When I am confronted with something I’ve done wrong, I usually don’t lie. If we really want to understand why our children behave the way they do, we must take a long, hard, honest look at ourselves. -- Om

 

54. "There are only two words that will always lead you to success. Those words are yes and no. Undoubtedly, you've mastered saying yes. So start practicing saying no. Your goals depend on it!" -- Jack Canfield

 

55. If fear arises, I remember my relationship with God. I am loved by a perfect Love; guided by wisdom that was here before time; strengthened by the One Power. With God, there is no challenge I cannot overcome. One day at a time, one step at a time, I move beyond the limits of fearful thinking. My faith in God protects me. -- Om

 

56. "There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age."

-- Sophia Loren

 

57. Focusing on our energetic center for communication allows us to connect to our truth and communicate that truth to others. For many of us our interactions are usually based on what we think the other person might want to hear. Using the power of our throat chakra, however, not only makes us more attuned to the needs of others but also reaches into the depths of our being and enables us to speak our mind in a way that is genuine. As you connect with your real thoughts and feelings today, you will find that your interactions will be more friendly, affirming, motivating, and honest. -- Om

 

58. Turning over our fears to the universe liberates us from the things that tend to hold us back. Everything we do and all the decisions we make are ultimately good because no matter what, we have something to learn from their outcomes. If we place this complete trust in the universe, we let go of the fears that bind us and open up to the infinite wisdom that can put us on the right path toward our own self-realization. -- Om

 

59. The beauty of living at this time is that even small actions have a powerful ripple effect, and the reverberations of what we do have the power to reach and open many minds. --Om

 

60. Practicing right speech helps us interact with others truthfully. When we become aware of the impact our words have on others, we will realize that even if our intentions are good, the ways in which we express ourselves are just as important as our actions. Words have the power to affect us in extremely profound ways. Setting the intention to speak honestly, however, extends the hand of genuine trust to others, and this erases any doubts or fears that would otherwise be present in the relationship. By keeping your word today, you will deepen your commitment to the people in your life and pave the way for greater honesty. -- Om

 

61.  Having the ability to see something in another person, and automatically bring this observation back to ourselves, is like having a built-in system of checks and balances that enables us to be continually engaged in self-exploration and behavior change. When we see behavior we don’t like, we can make a concerted effort to weed it out of ourselves, and when we see behavior we do like, we can let it inspire us to engage in imitation. Through this process, we read our environment and let it influence us to bring out the best in ourselves. -- Om

 

62. But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. -- Albert Camus, writer, philosopher, Nobel laureate (1913-1960) 

63. "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." -- Maya Angelou

64. Some of us may be moving along paths that are like rushing rivers; others may be on a large, still lake. We have all felt, at one time or another, tossed about on a stormy ocean. Through all this, we are never really alone, even though it might seem that way. There is inspiration all around us in the form of other people making their way through the world, in the very same boat. Remember to look around you for role models, companionship, and encouragement. -- Om

 

65. "Live life and take chances. Believe that everything happens for a reason and don't regret. Love to the fullest and you will find true happiness in life. Realize that things go wrong and people change, but things do go on. Sometimes things weren't meant to be. What is supposed to happen will work its way out."-- Author Unknown

 

66. By tuning into our intuitive wisdom, we can release irrational fears and take greater control over our lives. The source of our feelings can often be vague, which can leave us feeling uncertain about our choices. If we simply take the time to get connected with our intuition, we gain a better understanding of ourselves and our emotions. If we discover that our fears are justified, we can use that knowledge to make wiser choices for ourselves, and if we discover that our feelings are caused by irrational fears, we can work through them and release them. The end result is that we feel much more in control of our emotions and our lives. -- Om

 

67. We cannot truly connect with a person when we idealize them. In life, there are no pedestals—we are all walking on the same ground together. When we realize this, we can own our own divinity and our humanity. This is the key to balance and wholeness within ourselves and our relationships. -- Om

 

68.  "Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom."
-- Sandra Day O'Connor

69. By choosing to acknowledge that there are many truths and all of them hold equal merit to the believer, we free ourselves to align with the truths that resonate most strongly within us. The resistance we feel to alternate beliefs is usually caused by the conviction that our beliefs are right, so others' must be wrong. We can benefit greatly by choosing to understand that all beliefs can be right simultaneously, and alternate beliefs do not have to negate our own, unless we let them. With an accepting mindset, we are able to honor all beliefs while still holding fast to our own chosen ones, creating greater harmony in all of our interactions with others. If you match the level of your strong conviction with an equal measure of open-mindedness today, you can make others feel honored and respected, regardless of how their beliefs may differ from yours. -- Om

70. "Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again."                                -- Dag Hammarskjold

71. Each morning, when you have cast off the fog of sleep, take several deep, grounding breaths and reaffirm the love you have for yourself. Speaking a loving, self-directed blessing aloud enables you to access and awaken the reservoir of tenderness in your soul. Before you leave the comfortable warmth of your bed, be sure to tell the universe that you are eager and ready to receive the blessings it has set aside for you. Then as you prepare to meet the day, visualize yourself first saturated by and then surrounded with a warm and soft loving light. Gradually widen the circle of this light until you are able to send it ahead into your future. -- Om

72. We can feel purposeful and empowered when we become clear about our life's direction. Any dissatisfaction we feel about our lives can express itself as irritability or restlessness. If we can take time to explore these feelings and identify their underlying case, we can begin making different choices to improve our circumstances. We begin to feel empowered because we have a purpose and our restlessness disappears. -- Om

73. "The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it."              -- Bill Nye

74. Consciously choosing to expect the best as we pursue our goals helps us release our fear and doubt and gives us the confidence to persevere through all challenges. Having doubts about our ability to succeed is normal, but allowing these thoughts to run rampant will cause us to hold back from giving our best effort to our goals. If we take a moment to remember that a positive outcome is just as possible as a negative one, we will gain the optimism to believe in the possibilities for creating more fulfilling life circumstances. Not only do optimistic thoughts make us feel more confident and hopeful, they can also lend crucial energy to the formation of the outcome we desire. The more time you spend visualizing success and prosperity, the more likely you are to create it in your life. -- Om

75. "Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of -- for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear."  -- Socrates

76 Both prayer and meditation are indispensable tools for navigating our relationship with the universe and with ourselves. They are also natural complements to one another, and one makes way for the other just as the crest of a wave gives way to its hollow. If we tend to do only one or the other, prayer or meditation, we may find that we are out of balance, and we might benefit from exploring the missing form of communication. There are times when we need to reach out and express ourselves, fully exorcising our insides, and times when we are empty, ready to rest in quiet receiving. When we allow ourselves to do both, we begin to have a true conversation with the universe. -- Om 

77. "When your intention is great enough you will ALWAYS find the time and energy to accomplish your desires. You can state excuses to the contrary, but holding on to your old stories is just another way of wasting precious time." -- James Arthur Ray

78. "You see, we are here, as far as I can tell, to help each other; our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our enemies. That is to help each other and not hurt each other." -- Stevie Ray Vaughan

79. There is almost nothing better in the world than the feeling of showing up for our own lives. When we can do this, we become people that are more alive and who have the ability to make things happen in our lives and the lives of the people around us. We walk through the world with the knowledge that we have a lot to offer and the desire to share it. -- Om

80. By centering and grounding ourselves spiritually, we lend greater stability to our intuitive abilities. Intuitive abilities are often nondiscriminatory about the types of input they accept, which can cause us to feel overwhelmed and uncomfortable in volatile situations. We can easily take control of our intuition and limit the types of input we receive by taking time to center and ground ourselves spiritually. We then create a stronger sense of stability and harmony that will keep us from feeling overwhelmed by sensory input, and we can activate our intuition at will, using it to create more beneficial life circumstances. -- Om

81. "I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it."   - Harry S. Truman

82. Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it. -- Mark Twain

                                                                                           83. Ultimately, there is no way to avoid the truth, no matter how painful it is, so the sooner we let down our defenses, the better. When we know the truth and accept that we may have to adjust our lives to accommodate, we are in alignment with reality. At the same time, we can be patient with people around us who have a hard time seeing the truth, because we know how painful it can be. Whatever the truth is, we make a sincere effort not to close our eyes to it, but instead to be grateful that we have access to it.

84. You may feel compelled to judge your personal success using your age, your professional position, your level of education, or the accomplishments of your peers as a yardstick. Yet we all enjoy the major milestones in our lives at the appropriate time—some realize their dreams as youngsters while others flourish only in old age. If you take pride in your many accomplishments and make the most of every circumstance in which you find yourself, your time will come. -- Om

85. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

86. I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.”

87. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

88. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

 

89. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

 

90. Since the path of truth frequently represents the more difficult journey, embarking upon it builds character. You can harness the power of your word when you do your best to live a life of honesty and understand what motivates dishonesty. In keeping your agreements and embodying sincerity, you prove that you are worthy of trust and perceive values as something to be incorporated into your daily existence. – Om

 

91. "Growing into your future with health and grace and beauty doesn't have to take all your time. It rather requires a dedication to caring for yourself as if you were rare and precious, which you are, and regarding all life around you as equally so, which it is." -- Victoria Moran

 

92. Opening our imagination to explore new ideas allows us to expand our perception of what is possible for our lives. We often set goals based on what others expect of us or according to dreams we held in the past. If we make a point to brainstorm and open our minds to the possibilities for growth and fulfillment, we are able to expand on our goals and create circumstances that resonate more deeply with us. By making this a frequent habit, we are able to consistently and steadily improve our life circumstances and stay inspired about embracing the possibilities for positive change in our lives.