I felt that human partitions — bodies, brains, and souls — were capable of being demolished, and that humanity might return again, after frightfully bloody wandering, to its primeval, divine oneness. In this condition, there is no such thing as "me", "you", and "he"; everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist. Separately, we die one by one, but all together we are immortal. Like prodigal sons, after so much hunger, thirst, and rebellion, we spread our arms and embrace our two parents: heaven and earth.
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"Liberty", Ch. 12, p. 105Nikos Kazantzakis
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The oldest known Chinese sage is Lao-Tze, the founder of Taoism. "Lao Tze" is not really a proper name, but means merely "the old philosopher." He was (according to tradition) an older contemporary of Confucius, and his philosophy is to my mind far more interesting. He held that every person, every animal, and every thing has a certain way or manner of behaving which is natural to him, or her, or it, and that we ought to conform to this way ourselves and encourage others to conform to it. "Tao" means "way," but used in a more or less mystical sense, as in the text: "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life." I think he fancied that death was due to departing from the "way," and that if we all lived strictly according to nature we should be immortal, like the heavenly bodies.
Laozi (or Lao Tzu)
One of Parmenides' merits is to have been the first philosopher who strove to handle general concepts like "being", "not-being", "knowing", "unity", "identity", in their systematic connection.
Parmenides
"Tell me who it is who brings about the re-birth (the revolutio)?" is asked of the wise Hermes. "God's Son, the only man, through the will of God," is the answer of the "heathen." "God's son" is the immortal spirit assigned to every human being. It is this divine entity which is the "only man," for the casket which contains our soul, and the soul itself, are but half-entities, and without its overshadowing both body and astral soul, the two are but an animal duad. It requires a trinity to form the complete "man," and allow him to remain immortal at every "re-birth," or revolutio, throughout the subsequent and ascending spheres, every one of which brings him nearer to the refulgent realm of eternal and absolute light.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
"Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven and returned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned." These are the words of a great Muslim saint, 'AbdulQuddës of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of "unitary experience"; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large.
Muhammad Iqbal
"Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn't feed themselves, because they couldn't get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!" "They starved?" "They fed each other! That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!" I don't believe in the afterlife." "Neither do I, but I believe in the story."
Jonathan Safran Foer
Kazantzakis, Nikos
Kean, Tom
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