Quotes

Gina: If you're not careful you'll end up in roast pork.
Porco Rosso: You want me to stop flying to make bacon.
 
An Englishman who seems to have known a thing or two.

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?" - John Keats

Found more of this quote here, and thought it was worth sharing.

“Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....

There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.

Intelligences are atoms of perception -- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them -- so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?

This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion -- or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation...

I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive -- and yet I think I perceive it -- that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways....

As various as the lives of men are -- so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence.

This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity...”
 
An Englishman who seems to have known a thing or two.

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?" - John Keats

"Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; " -- Tennyson
 
It's pretty remarkable, eh?

Great quote! I've actually been thinking something similar the past few weeks. That life would be boring if I didn't have anything to work on. It seems we're fortunate to be works in progress.
 
It's pretty remarkable, eh?

Very! This morning I found the rest of the letter, and towards the end of his April 21 or 22 letter he revealed how he came to this idea of salvation, or rather soul creation:

If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will put you in the place where I began in this series of thoughts—I mean I began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances—and what are circumstances but touchstones of his heart? and what are touchstones but provings of his heart, but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? and what is his altered nature but his Soul?—and what was his Soul before it came into the world and had these provings and alterations and perfectionings?—An intelligence without Identity—and how is this Identity to be made? Through the medium of the Heart? and how is the heart to become this Medium but in a world of Circumstances?

Which is to say that it was through observation of his normal and everyday experiences that he learned the purpose of life and suffering. Like you said, it's pretty remarkable.
 
“Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them.”

Александар III Македонски
 
...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet
I was thinking how this applies to life, learning and lessons in particular. If we're going through a rough period, we are filled with questions as to why it is happening, among other things. So the suggestions in the quote seem fitting. Have patience, don't be judgmental because you cannot understand what is really going on due to your current state of being. You can only understand or "live the answer" by changing your state of being, which involes suffering, which means going through your present predicament. It's a neccesary part of the growth process.
 
"On the whole,though i never arrived at the perfection i had been so ambitious of obtaining,but fell short of it,yet i was,by the endever,a better and happier man than i otherwise should have been,had i not attempted it.
Benjamin Franklin".
 
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
 
Hatonn

My friends, man on Earth has become very shortsighted in appreciation of the creation. He does not understand the true meaning of the simple and beautiful life that surrounds him. He does not appreciate its generation and regeneration. He learns that the very atmosphere that he breathes is cycled through the plant life to be regenerated to support him and his fellow beings and creatures, and yet this seems to the vast majority of those who dwell upon this planet to be an exercise in technology rather than one in theology. There is no awareness of the Creator’s plan to provide for His children, to provide for their every desire and to provide a state of perfection. Man on Earth has lost the awareness that is rightfully his. And why, my friends, has he lost this awareness? He has lost this because he has focused his attention upon devices and inventions of his own. He has become hypnotized by his playthings and his ideas.

The Law of One - Intro

 
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