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It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived. The spirit is permanent, the body changes; and a body which refuses to change must die. The spirit expresses itself in many ways while itself remaining essentially the same but the body must change to suit its changing environments if it wishes to live. There is no doubt that the institution of caste degenerated. It ceased to be determined by spiritual qualifications which, once essential, have now come to be subordinate and even immaterial and is determined by the purely material tests of occupation and birth. By this change it has set itself against the fundamental tendency of Hinduism which is to insist on the spiritual and subordinate the material and thus lost most of its meaning. The spirit of caste arrogance, exclusiveness and superiority came to dominate it instead of the spirit of duty, and the change weakened the nation and helped to reduce us to our present conditions.
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22 September 1907

 

Sri Aurobindo

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[W]e shall find a very material difference between the body and the spirit; the body is supposed to be organized matter, and the spirit, by many, is thought to be immaterial, without substance. With this latter statement we should beg leave to differ, and state the spirit is a substance; that it is material, but that it is more pure, elastic and refined matter than the body; that it existed before the body, can exist in the body; and will exist separate from the body, when the body will be mouldering in the dust; and will in the resurrection, be again united with it.

 

Joseph Smith

 

In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken.

 

Miyamoto Musashi

 

"The true foundation of all culture is the knowledge and understanding of water. Water is the ur-substance or ur-cause of all creation and for this reason is the ur-original accumulator, which readily absorbs both earthly and cosmic substances and conveys them to the body in a purely objective form. This must be done in such a way that the ur-attributes will in no way be modified and that change as such can only first come about in the effect, which the organically correctly structured body mediates and imparts. For this reason a good spirit dwells in a healthy body. Conversely a body full of vitality can be created, maintained and further developed by healing the inhering spirit."

 

Viktor Schauberger

 

The resurrection state is the culmination of glorified humanity; is the change of the earthly for the heavenly; is the putting off of flesh and blood, and the putting on of the spiritual body. The body of the resurrection is the body with which the spirit is clothed for its celestial life.

 

Randolph Sinks Foster

 

When someone's body can no longer perform its functions in the natural world in response to the thoughts and affections of its spirit (which it derives from the spiritual world), then we say that the individual has died. This happens when the lungs' breathing and the heart's systolic motion have ceased. The person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential person is still alive because we are not people because of our bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us the people we are. We can see, then, that when we die we simply move from one world into another. This is why in the inner meaning of the Bible, "death" means resurrection and a continuation of life.

 

Emanuel Swedenborg