Category: Quotations

C. S. Lewis on Broken Hearts

Quotations, Tarot

A quotation from C. S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves which certainly added to my understanding of the Three of Swords:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

VI of Wands: Good and Evil

Good and Evil, Quotations, Tarot

VI of Wands

The victory of Good over Evil?
Good and Evil
keep the universe in balance,
like yin and yang, male and female.

Good is the war against Evil,
Evil the war against Good.

Yes, that’s what Good is, what Evil is.

 

If you like the poem you can find that one – and all the others! –  in The Complete Tarot Poems.

Faith & Belief

Christianity, Mysticism, Quotations

In the western world, notions of Faith and Belief are based on the Judeo-Christian tradition preserved for us in the Bible, especially the writings of St Paul.  St Paul and the other New Testament authors wrote in Greek, the lingua franca of the 1st-century world, and Greek has only one word pistis for our two words “faith” and “belief”. Faith in Greek is pistis. Belief in Greek is pistis.

Let’s start with the English words and come back to the Greek later.

Belief means believing that something is so or believing somebody or believing some source of information: “I believe that the world is round.” “I believe you / I believe what you said to me.” “You can’t always believe what you read in the papers.

Much the same is believe in: “I believe/don’t believe in Father Christmas, unicorns, the Greek gods, mermaids.”

It is what we mean when we say “An atheist is a person who does not believe in God.”

Now, is there any real difference between believing in God and having faith in God?

I contend that there is.

Yet according to John Hick:

The majority of recent philosophical critics of religion have in mind a definition of faith as the believing of propositions upon insufficient evidence.

He goes on:

Many philosophical defenders of religion share the same assumption …

In other words they do not see any difference between “believing in God” and “having faith in God”. For them, having faith in God means believing that God exists.

But wait a moment. “I have faith in my daughter” means I trust her, I know she will do the right thing.

And curiously, “I believe in my daughter” means more or less the same.

How can this be?

The existence of my daughter is not in doubt. When the existence is in doubt, as in the case of Father Christmas, God and mermaids, then believe in means believe that they exist; have faith in never means that.

Having faith in implies knowing. Not knowing of/knowing about (that would be believing in the existence of) but knowing, as in “I know myself,” or “I know my wife”. We cannot have faith in a person we do not know.

So someone who has faith in God is not identical with someone who believes in God. You may believe in God because you were brought up to believe in God (very, very often the case!) or because one of the philosophical proofs of the existence of God has convinced you (rarely now the case, I imagine). But then you are in much the same position as the person who says “I believe there is someone living in that apartment on the 4th floor.” The use of the verb “believe” implies insufficient evidence. If, on the other hand, you have met the new tenant (or the squatter) living in that apartment, then you know there is someone living there. And if you have spent time becoming acquainted with this tenant/squatter, then you know him/her. The statement “There is no one living in the apartment on the 4th floor” will be, to you, simply absurd.

Likewise, you have met God and have got to know Him. He has become part of your life. And knowing Him, you have come to have faith in Him The idea that He doesn’t exist is, to you, as absurd as the idea that you yourself do not exist.

All that, of course, is equally absurd, indeed much more absurd, to atheists and agnostics, and to those who simply believe in God for one reason or another without really knowing Him. However, their incomprehension and derision does not mean that it is an illusion, that “the man of faith” is kidding himself. Try explaining music to the deaf, or even the tone-deaf, or art to the blind, or the simply colour-blind. Try explaining love to one who has never known love …

In a future post I will return to the Greek word pistis, to the Fourth Gospel and St Paul, and to the knowing without which there can be no faith.

Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born Jew who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reincarnation (introductory post)

Hinduism, Mysticism, Quotations, Reincarnation

Perhaps you already know something about reincarnation, being born again in another body to live another life, and you do not find it inherently absurd – or even particularly weird. And perhaps, like most people who have reached that point in their thinking and reading and discussing with like-minded friends, you  will have begun to wonder about your previous lives and how those lives might be affecting the life you are living now.

The carry-on effect from past lives into the present life is called Karma. It is an Indian (Sanscrit) word that those of you who (like me) practise yoga may have come across when talking or reading about yoga philosophy.

Karma means the baggage we bring with us from one life to the next. It is NOT judgement and punishment for one’s sins. It is simply a matter of cause and effect: like if you smoke or drink or eat too much and get ill, this is not a punishment, it is simply a consequence.

Things you did, and things that happened to you, in previous lives can have very grave consequences in this life. And knowing about them can make all the difference.

* * * * *

Schopenhauer
Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him:  It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.

Socrates
I am confident that there is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead.

Albert Schweitzer
Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.

Josephus (most well known Jewish historian from the time of Jesus)
All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies.

Paul Gauguin
When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.
[Paul Gauguin was one of the great French post-impressionist painters. Here is his masterpiece “D’où venons nous, que sommes nous, où allons nous?” – “Where do we come from, what are we. where do we go?”]

Leo Tolstoy
As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life … and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real life – the life of God.

Henry Ford
I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was 26. Genius is experience. Some think to seem that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives”.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.” “As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.”

David  Thoreau
As far back as I can remember, I have unconsciously referred to the experiences of a previous state of existence.

Jack London
I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing through incalculable myriads of millenniums … All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me.

William Wordsworth
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting …

John Masefield
I hold that when a person dies
His soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh disguise,
Another mother gives him birth
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain
The old soul takes the road again.

George Harrison
Friends are all souls that we’ve known in other lives …

Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)
Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating or fighting …?

Freidrich Nietzsche
Live so that thou mayest desire to live again – that is thy duty – for in any case thou wilt live again!

Mahatma Ghandi
I cannot think of permanent enmity between man and man, and believing as I do in the theory of reincarnation, I live in the hope that if not in this birth, in some other birth I shall be able to hug all of humanity in friendly embrace.

Diordus Siculus (c. 60 BC – 30 AD)
The Druids believe that] the souls of men are immortal, and that after a definite number of years they live a second life when the soul passes to another body. … And Pythagoras learned from Egyptians his teachings about the gods, his geometrical propositions and theory of numbers, as well as the transmigration of the soul into every living thing

The Zohar (The fundamental text of Kaballah)
The souls must re-enter the absolute substance whence they have emerged. But to accomplish this, they must develop all the perfections, the germ of which is planted in them; and if they have not fulfilled this condition during one life, they must commence another, a third, and so forth, until they have acquired the condition which fits them for reunion with God.

The Bhagavad-gitā
As the embodied soul continually passes in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. … As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.