About Gratitude

First of all, gratitude increases wisdom, modesty, and love, and the soul becomes light.

When practicing gratitude, you begin to notice how happy you yourself are and how many people and living beings support your own happiness. When also discovering how many living beings are victimized by our lives, we have a mindset of remorse and become more humble. Gratitude then increases love for many living beings, which becomes the basis for practicing altruism.

Gratitude makes the soul strong to suffering. Even in times of disappointment, failure, and loss, you can notice what you have already been given and become positive. Gratitude also increases love for all beings, and when you realize that there are many people in the world suffering much more than yours, you become able to tolerate your suffering and it begins to seem quite insignificant.

Also, medical experts say that gratitude alleviates stress, which is a cause of cancer and lowered immunity. So it is good for physical health as well. A person who is devoid of dissatisfaction and full of gratitude becomes loved by others, creates good connections, and gains material prosperity.

In this way, gratitude is beneficial in all directions: mental, physical, and material.

Concentrate on listening to this instruction! Your consciousness never had a beginning and will never have an end....! Your consciousness was never created by any cause! It will never be destroyed by any circumstance! Therefore, abide in peace and effortlessness, in the indescribable and uncreated state! Then the fruit, Awakening, will be found in you without your striving for it! Otherwise, you will not find any Awakened One! For there is no way to what is eternally Present in you - as your original nature and essence!

Guru Padmasambhava

The serpent, the dragon; call it Vritra, Hydra, Python, Typhon, Jörmungandr, Fafnir, Zmey, Vishap, or by its Christian name, Satan. The enormous reptile is a symbol of the enemy of our people as Eliade explains in the quote. It is therefore clear what the dragon slayer represents.
Although St. George is a popular Saint in many nations, his worship in England is a continuation of the ancient Indo-European tradition. The Germanic hero Sigurd, known as Sigeweard to the English and Sigfried to the Germans, is the archetypal dragon slayer in Germanic heroic myth.

"People of peace, men and women of desire, such is the splendor of the Temple in which you will one day have the right to take your place. Such privilege should astonish you less, however, than your ability to commence building it down here, your ability, in fact, to adorn it at every moment of your existence. Remember the saying 'as above, so below', and contribute to this by making 'as below, so above'."

- Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin

"Where time never entered, where no image ever shone, in the inmost and highest part of the soul, God is creating the whole world."

~ Meister Eckhart

for the NGE enjoyers

“Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Image: Kalki Avatar slaying demons by Fridolin Froehlich

Additional Notes: Some representations of the Kalki avatar show a white horse with no rider, suggesting the question: Who is missing? Why is the white horse riderless? Who shall be mounted on this horse?

This imagery is consistent with the challenge facing humanity today: to restore honour to manhood in the fullest possibility of genuine virile power that can be imagined. The haunting image of the riderless horse points exactly to what is missing in the current closing chapter of the world drama: the Kalki avatar is the wrath of Gaia-Sophia in male-gendered expression.

Until that happens, the honour of man is a riderless horse.

The Extraordinary In The Ordinary
By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Our acceptance of the ordinary is part of our spiritual maturity and capacity to be of service. It also helps us to avoid the trap of inflation, which can easily catch us when we glimpse a world beyond the ego. It is only too easy to identify with an inner experience. But when we let go of wanting spiritual life to be about us, when we live in the various dimensions without mixing the levels or imposing expectations and desires, this freedom allows us to fully participate in spiritual work.

Present in both the inner and outer world, one learns to serve the world, serve life, serve others without effort. This is a very careful balance. If one takes upon oneself the onerous responsibility of service, then the ego easily gets caught in it; the psyche gets encumbered by it. But being engaged in an ordinary life allows us to be of service without the burden of thinking we can solve the world's or other people's problems, which brings with it self-importance and, worse, spiritual self-importance.

Naqshbandi Sufis have always lived this way, forsaking special robes and working in ordinary jobs, traditionally often as craftsmen – Baha ad-Din Naqshband was a potter, Attar a perfumer. And of course many of the great Zen and Taoist teachers emphasized the ordinary and the dangers of spiritual importance:

Emperor Wu: 'I have built many temples, copied innumerable
Sutras and ordained many monks since becoming Emperor. Therefore, I ask you, what is my merit?'

Bodhidharma: 'None whatsoever!'

Emperor Wu: 'Why no merit?'

Bodhidharma: 'Doing things for merit has an impure motive and will only bear the puny fruit of rebirth.'

Emperor Wu, a little put out: 'What then is the most important principle of Buddhism?'

Bodhidharma: 'Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred.'

Emperor Wu, by now bewildered, and not a little indignant: 'Who is this that stands before me?'

Bodhidharma: 'I do not know.'

If we can allow ourselves to live an ordinary life while also staying awake to the great void at the center of all that is, then we can be this intermediary place between that intoxicating, mystical bliss of oblivion and the wonder of how the Divine creates and reveals Itself in all the forms of life. Our lives are the expression of this bridge – ordinary and extraordinary, all things in their place, everything free to be as it is, and our consciousness, our heart, free to be used as needed.