Whata ya want?  I earned my degree/no-degree @  

South Harmon Institute of Technology

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excerpted from … (FOTM, Page 20-21) Lama Anagarika Govinda

[…forgive any shoddy transliteration by my shitty big padded fingertips; thanx shitheads….]

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     The seer, the poet and singer, the spiritually creative, the psychically receptive and sensitive, the saint: they all know about the essentiality of form in word and sound, in the visible and the tangible.  They do not despise what appears small or insignificant, because they can see the great in the small.  Through them the word becomes mantra, and the sounds and signs of which it is formed, become the vehicles of mysterious forces. Through them the visible takes on the nature of symbols, the tangible becomes a creative tool of the spirit, and life becomes a deep stream, flowing from eternity to eternity. 

     It is good to be reminded from time to time that the attitude of the East was at home also in the West, and that the tradition of the ‘inward’ or spiritualized word and of the reality and actuality of the symbol had it’s prophets even in our time. We may only mention here Rainer Maria Rilke’s mantric conception of the ‘word’, which reveals the very essence of mantric power:

‘Wo sich langsam ous dem Shon-Vergessen,

                                                 Einst Erfahrenes sich uns entgegenhebt,

                                                 Rein gemeistert, milde, unermessen

                                                 Und im Unantastbaren erlebt :

Dort beginnt das Wort, wie wir es meinen,

                                                 Seine Geltung ü bertrifft uns still ---

                                                 Denn der Geist, der uns vereinsamt,

                                                 Völlig sicher sein, uns zu vereinen.’*

*  Though a literal translation cannot convey the beauty of the original, the following rendering may be useful to the non-German-speaking reader:

                                                 ‘Where slowly from the long-forgotten,

                                                   Past experience rises up in us,

         Perfectly mastered, mild and beyond measure,

                                                   And realized in the intangible:

   There begins the word, as we conceive it,

And its meaning quietly surpasses us ---

  For the mind that makes us lonely, wants

                                                    To be sure that we shall be united.’