The treasure I have found cannot be described in words, the mind cannot conceive of it.
Adi ShankaraRead
Like the appearance of silver in mother of pearl, the world seems real until the Self, the underlying reality, is realized.
Interpretation
The world appears authentic until one recognizes the deeper reality of the Self.
This quote by Adi Shankara highlights the philosophical perspective that our perception of the world is often an illusion, akin to the shiny outer appearance of silver on mother of pearl. The deeper significance lies in the awareness of the Self, which transcends material reality and leads to a true understanding of existence.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality and perception.
The treasure I have found cannot be described in words, the mind cannot conceive of it.
Even after the Truth has been realised, there remains that strong, obstinate impression that one is still an ego - the agent and experiencer. This has to be carefully removed by living in a state of constant identification with the supreme non-dual Self. Full Awakening is the eventual ceasing of all the mental impressions of being an ego.
Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.
As gold purified in a furnace loses its impurities and achieves its own true nature, the mind gets rid of the impurities of the attributes of delusion, attachment and purity through meditation and attains Reality.
But the jiva [living being] is endowed with ego and his knowledge is limited, whereas Ishwar is without ego and is omniscient.
There is sorrow in finitude. The Self is beyond time, space and objects. It is infinite and hence of the nature of absolute happiness.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all. He would have fared better had he died young.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
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