Home > Topic > an obstacle

an obstacle  QUOTES

24 " In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom "

Simone de Beauvoir , The Ethics of Ambiguity

28 " A special and very important characteristic of Trika yoga, which is not found in other systems, is its doctrine of “possession” (samavesa). In samavesa practitioners are suddenly infused and possessed with Shivahood, and feel themselves to be omniscient and omnipotent. This is not the kind of possession or haunting that occurs when the power that haunts and the person who is haunted are different. Rather, yogins in samavesa enter a state of unity, and their limited individual personalities get expanded into universal I-consciousness which they feel to be divinely potent in all respects. Samavesa has been defined as the immersion of the dependence of a dependent consciousness into the independence of the Independent Consciousness (Tantraloka, I.73). It is actually the sudden and direct intuitional realization of one’s Divine Essence, called Isvarapratyabhijna.Sufficient practice in samavesa results in a state of jivanmukti (liberation in this very life) in which a yogin develops supernatural divine powers (siddhis). A jivanmukta can use these divine powers simply by willing them to be (Isvarapratyabhijnavimarsini, IV.i.15), though such a refined individual would most probably avoid meddling with the natural order, or in matters of divine administration, which are the province of a long hierarchy of male and female deities at different levels of authority. This kind of yogic attainment is not considered to be an obstacle on the path of final liberation. Rather, it is said to be helpful, as it removes any lingering doubt about the divine nature of the Self, and develops a firm faith in the eventual attainment of absolute unity with Paramasiva when the individual dies (Tantraloka, XII, 183–85). Further, these abilities help create faith and confidence in the mind of worthy disciples who feel that the preceptor, being liberated, can liberate others as well.— B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. 96–97. "