Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity. Vince Lombardi
The goal of the organisms of the Spiritual World is nothing less than this--to be "holy as He is holy, and pure as He is pure." And by the Law of Conformity to Type, their final perfection is secured. The inward nature must develop out according to its Type, until the consummation of oneness with God is reached. Natural Law, p. 403.
The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men.
I feel that the essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others. When you have a pure, sincere motivation, then you have right attitude toward others based on kindness, compassion, love and respect. Practice brings the clear realisation of the oneness of all human beings and the importance of others benefiting by your actions.
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.
Man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle — has had the leading part.
When the original oneness of earth and heaven, of the human and the divine natures, has once been discovered, the question of the return of the soul to God assumes a new character. It is no longer a question of an ascension to heaven, an approach to the throne of God, an ecstatic vision of God, and a life in a heavenly Paradise. The vision of God is rather the knowledge of the divine element in the soul, and of the consubstantiality of the divine and human natures. Immortality has no longer to be asserted, because there can be no death for what is divine, and therefore immortal, in man. There is life eternal and peace eternal for all who feel the divine Spirit as dwelling within them, and have thus become the children of God.
quote. “Your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him” (Matthew 6:8). Then why should we ask? The point of prayer is not to get answers from God, but to have perfect and complete oneness with Him. If we pray only because we want answers, we will become irritated and angry with God. We receive an answer every time we pray, but it does not always come in the way we expect, and our spiritual irritation shows our refusal to identify ourselves truly with our Lord in prayer. We are not here to prove that God answers prayer, but to be living trophies of God’s grace.5
Awakener, come! Fling wide the gate of an eternal year, The April of that glad new heavens and earth Which shall grow out of these, as spring-tide grows Slow out of winter's breast. Let Thy wide hand Gather us all — with none left out (O God! Leave Thou out none!) from the east and from the west. Loose Thou our burdens: heal our sicknesses; Give us one heart, one tongue, one faith, one love. In Thy great Oneness made complete and strong — To do Thy work throughout the happy world — Thy world, All-merciful, Thy perfect world.
Christianity is Christianity by this one fundamental truth, that as God is the father of man, so truly, and not poetically, or metaphorically only, man is the son of God, participating in God's very essence and nature, though separated from God by self and sin. This oneness of nature between the Divine and the human does not lower the concept of God by bringing it nearer to the level of humanity; on the contrary, it raises the old concept of man and brings it nearer to its true ideal. The true relation between God and man had been dimly foreseen by many prophets and poets, but Christ was the first to proclaim that relation in clear and simple language. He called Himself the Son of God, and He was the firstborn son of God in the fullest sense of that word. But He never made Himself equal with the Father in whom He lived and moved and had His being. He was man in the new and true sense of the word, and in the new and true sense of the word He was God. To my mind man is nothing if He does not participate in the Divine.
And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation. -- Dr. Albert Hoffman
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.
The universal belief in the efficacy of invocation as an indispensable adjunct to sacrifices and religious rites generally, could not fail to engender and maintain in the minds of the people feelings of profound esteem and reverence towards those who possessed the divine gift of inspired utterance, as well as for those who had acquired an intimate knowledge of the approved forms of ritual worship. A common designation of the priest is brahman (nom. _brahma_), originally denoting, it would seem, "one who prays, a worshipper," perhaps also "the composer of a hymn" (_brahman_, n.); and the same term came subsequently to be used not only for one of the sacerdotal order generally, but also, and more commonly, as the designation of a special class of priests who officiated as superintendents during sacrificial performances, the complicated nature of which required the co-operation of a whole staff of priests, and who accordingly were expected to possess a competent knowledge of the entire course of ritual procedure, including the correct form and mystic import of the sacred texts to be repeated or chanted by the several priests. The Brahman priest (_brahma_) being thus the recognized head of the sacerdotal order (_brahma_), which itself is the visible embodiment of sacred writ and the devotional spirit pervading it (_brahma_), the complete realization of theocratic aspirations required but a single step, which was indeed taken in the theosophic speculations of the later Vedic poets and the authors of the Brahmanas (q.v.), viz. the recognition of this abstract notion of the Brahma as the highest cosmic principle and its identification with the pantheistic conception of an all-pervading, self-existent spiritual substance, the primary source of the universe; and subsequently coupled therewith the personification of its creative energy in the form of Brahma, the divine representative of the earthly priest, who was made to take the place of the earlier conception of _Prajapati_, "the lord of creatures" (see BRAHMANISM). By this means the very name of this god expressed the essential oneness of his nature with that of the divine spirit as whose manifestation he was to be considered. In the later Vedic writings, especially the Brahmanas, however, Prajapati still maintains throughout his position as the paramount personal deity; and Brahma, in his divine capacity, is rather identified with Brihaspati, the priest of the gods. Moreover, the exact relationship between Prajapati and the Brahma (n.) is hardly as yet defined with sufficient precision; it is rather one of simple identification: in the beginning the Brahma was the All, and Prajapati is the Brahma. It is only in the institutes of Manu, where we find the system of castes propounded in its complete development, that Brahma has his definite place assigned to him in the cosmogony. According to this work, the universe, before undiscerned, was made discernible in the beginning by the sole, self-existent lord Brahma (n.). He, desirous of producing different beings from his own self, created the waters by his own thought, and placed in them a seed which developed into a golden egg; therein was born Brahma (m.), the parent of all the worlds; and thus "that which is the undiscrete Cause, eternal, which is and is not, from it issued that male who is called in the world Brahma." Having dwelt in that egg for a year, that lord spontaneously by his own thought split that egg in two; and from the two halves he fashioned the heaven and the earth, and in the middle, the sky, and the eight regions (the points of the compass), and the perpetual place of the waters. This theory of Brahma being born from a golden egg is, however, a mere adaptation of the Vedic conception of _Hiranya-garbha_ ("golden embryo"), who is represented as the supreme god in a hymn of the tenth (and last) book of the _Rigveda_. Another still later myth, which occurs in the epic poems, makes Brahma be born from a lotus which grew out of the navel of the god Vishnu whilst floating on the primordial waters. In artistic representations, Brahma usually appears as a bearded man of red colour with four heads crowned with a pointed, tiara-like head-dress, and four hands holding his sceptre, or a sacrificial spoon, a bundle of leaves representing the Veda, a bottle of water of the Ganges, and a string of beads or his bow Parivita. His vehicle (_vahana_) is a goose or swan (_hamsa_), whence he is also called _Hamsavhana_; and his consort is Sarasvati, the goddess of learning. Entry: BRAHMAN
Morgan criticized with great freedom the moral character of the persons and events of Old Testament history, developing the theory of conscious "accommodation" on the part of the leaders of the Jewish church. This accommodation of truth, by altering the form and substance of it to meet the views and secure the favour of ignorant and bigoted contemporaries, Morgan attributes also to the apostles and to Jesus. He likewise expands at great length a theory of the origin of the Catholic Church much like that sketched by Toland, but assumes that Paul and his party, latterly at least, were distinctly hostile to the Judaical party of their fellow-believers in Jesus as the Messias, while the college of the original twelve apostles and their adherents viewed Paul and his followers with suspicion and disfavour. Persecution from without Morgan regards as the influence which mainly forced the antagonistic parties into the oneness of the catholic and orthodox church. Morgan "seems to have discerned the dawning of a truer and better method" than the others. "He saw dimly that things require to be accounted for as well as affirmed or denied," and he was "one of the pioneers of modern historical science as applied to biblical criticism." Entry: DEISM
_The Baptist World Alliance_ was formed in 1905, when the first Baptist World Congress was held in London. The preamble of the constitution of this Alliance sufficiently indicates its nature: "Whereas, in the providence of God, the time has come when it seems fitting more fully to manifest the essential oneness in the Lord Jesus Christ, as their God and Saviour, of the churches of the Baptist order and faith throughout the world, and to promote the spirit of fellowship, service and co-operation among them, while recognizing the independence of each particular church and not assuming the functions of any existing organization, it is agreed to form a Baptist alliance, extending over every part of the world." This alliance does in fact include Baptists in every quarter of the globe, as will be seen from the following statistics:-- Entry: 3
In the ancient compositions in the vulgar tongue, especially in poetry, non-Tuscan authors on the one hand accommodated their own dialect to the analogy of that which they felt to be the purest representative of the language of ancient Roman culture, while the Tuscan authors in their turn did not refuse to adopt the forms which had received the rights of citizenship from the literary celebrities of other parts of Italy. It was this state of matters which gave rise in past times to the numerous disputes about the true fatherland and origin of the literary language of the Italians. But these have been deprived of all right to exist by the scientific investigation of the history of that language. If the older Italian poetry assumed or maintained forms alien to Tuscan speech, these forms were afterwards gradually eliminated, and the field was left to those which were purely Tuscan and indeed purely Florentine. And thus it remains absolutely true that, so far as phonetics, morphology, rudimental syntax, and in short the whole character and material of words and sentences are concerned, there is no literary language of Europe that is more thoroughly characterized by homogeneity and oneness, as if it had come forth in a single cast from the furnace, than the Italian. Entry: D
Adam Ferguson (_Institutes of Moral Philosophy_, p. 119, new ed., 1800) argues that "the desire for immortality is an instinct, and can reasonably be regarded as an indication of that which the author of this desire wills to do." From the standpoint of modern science John Fiske confirms the validity of such an argument; for what he affirms in regard to belief in the divine is equally applicable to this belief in a future life. "If the relation thus established in the morning twilight of man's existence between the human soul and a world invisible and immaterial is a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the objective term is non-existent; then I say it is something utterly without precedent in the whole history of creation" (_Through Nature to God_, 1899, p. 188, 189). Whatever may have been Hegel's own belief in regard to personal immortality, the logical issue of his absolute idealism has been well stated by W. Windelband (_History of Philosophy_, p. 633). "It became clear that in the system of perpetual Becoming and of the dialectical passing over of all forms into one another, the finite personality could scarcely raise a plausible claim to the character of a substance and to immortality in the religious sense." F. D. Schleiermacher applies the phrase "the immortality of religion" to the religious emotion of oneness, amid finitude, with the infinite and, amid time, with the eternal; denies any necessary connexion between the belief in the continuance of personal existence and the consciousness of God; and rests his faith on immortality altogether on Christ's promise of living fellowship with His followers, as presupposing their as well as His personal immortality. A. Schopenhauer assigns immortality to the universal will to live; and Feuerbach declares spirit, consciousness eternal, but not any individual subject. R. H. Lotze for the decision of the question lays down the broad principle, "All that has once come to be will eternally continue so soon as for the organic unity of the world it has an unchangeable value, but it will obviously again cease to be, when that is not the case" (_Gr. der Psy._ p. 74). Entry: IMMORTALITY
The earlier oecumenical councils have well been called "the pitched battles of church history." Summoned to combat heresy and schism, in spite of degrading pressure from without and tumultuous disorder within, they ultimately brought about a modicum of doctrinal agreement. On the one side as time went on they bound scholarship hand and foot in the winding-sheet of tradition, and also fanned the flames of intolerance; yet on the other side they fostered the sense of the Church's corporate oneness. The diocesan and provincial synods have formed a valuable system of regularly recurring assemblies for disposing of ecclesiastical business. They have been held most frequently, however, in times of stress and of reform, for instance in the 11th, 16th and 19th centuries; at other periods they have lapsed into disuse: it is significant that to-day the prelate who neglects to convene them suffers no penalty. At present the main function of both provincial and oecumenical synods seems to be to facilitate obedience to the wishes of the central government of the Church. Entry: COUNCIL
1. _The Atoms and Cosmology_ (adopted in part at least from the doctrines of Leucippus, though the relations between the two are hopelessly obscure). While agreeing with the Eleatics as to the eternal sameness of Being (nothing can arise out of nothing; nothing can be reduced to nothing), Democritus followed the physicists in denying its oneness and immobility. Movement and plurality being necessary to explain the phenomena of the universe and impossible without space (not-Being), he asserted that the latter had an equal right with Being to be considered existent. Being is the Full ([Greek: plêres], plenum); not-Being is the Void ([Greek: kenon], _vacuum_), the infinite space in which moved the infinite number of atoms into which the single Being of the Eleatics was broken up. These atoms are eternal and invisible; absolutely small, so small that their size cannot be diminished (hence the name [Greek: atomos], "indivisible"); absolutely full and incompressible, they are without pores and entirely fill the space they occupy; homogeneous, differing only in figure (as A from N), arrangement (as AN from NA), position (as N is Z on its side), magnitude (and consequently in weight, although some authorities dispute this). But while the atoms thus differ in quantity, their differences of quality are only apparent, due to the impressions caused on our senses by different configurations and combinations of atoms. A thing is only hot or cold, sweet or bitter, hard or soft by convention ([Greek: nomô]); the only things that exist in reality ([Greek: eteê]) are the atoms and the void. Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities is here anticipated. Thus, the atoms of water and iron are the same, but those of the former, being smooth and round, and therefore unable to hook on to one another, roll over and over like small globes, whereas the atoms of iron, being rough, jagged and uneven, cling together and form a solid body. Since all phenomena are composed of the same eternal atoms (just as a tragedy and a comedy contain the same letters) it may be said that nothing comes into being or perishes in the absolute sense of the words (cf. the modern "indestructibility of matter" and "conservation of energy"), although the compounds of the atoms are liable to increase and decrease, appearance and disappearance--in other words, to birth and death. As the atoms are eternal and uncaused, so is motion; it has its origin in a preceding motion, and so on _ad infinitum_. For the Love and Hate of Empedocles and the _Nous_ (Intelligence) of Anaxagoras, Democritus substituted fixed and necessary laws (not chance; that is a misrepresentation due chiefly to Cicero). Everything can be explained by a purely mechanical (but not fortuitous) system, in which there is no room for the idea of a providence or an intelligent cause working with a view to an end. The origin of the universe was explained as follows. An infinite number of atoms was carried downwards through infinite space. The larger (and heavier), falling with greater velocity, overtook and collided with the smaller (and lighter), which were thereby forced upwards. This caused various lateral and contrary movements, resulting in a whirling movement ([Greek: dinê]) resembling the rotation of Anaxagoras, whereby similar atoms were brought together (as in the winnowing of grain) and united to form larger bodies and worlds. Atoms and void being infinite in number and extent, and motion having always existed, there must always have been an infinite number of worlds, all consisting of similar atoms, in various stages of growth and decay. Entry: 1