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Angels:
The Mysterious Messengers
“It
is only the man with the most perfect divine moral
nature who is able to combine in himself quickness of
apprehension, intelligence and understanding —
qualities necessary for the exercise of command,
magnanimity, generosity, benignity, and gentleness —
qualities necessary for the exercise of patience,
originality, energy, strength of character, and
determination — qualities necessary for the exercise
of endurance, piety, noble seriousness, order, and
regularity — qualities necessary for the exercise of
dignity, grace, method, subtlety, and penetration —
qualities necessary for the exercise of critical
judgment.
Thus all-embracing and vast is the nature of such a
man. Profound it is and inexhaustible, like a living
spring of water, ever running out with life and
vitality. All-embracing and vast, it is like Heaven.
Profound and inexhaustible, it is like the abyss.
As soon as such a man shall make his appearance in the
world, all people will reverence him. Whatever he
says, all people will believe it. Whatever he does,
all people will be pleased with it. Thus his fame and
name will spread and fill all the civilized world,
extending even to savage countries, wherever ships and
carriages reach, wherever the labor and enterprise of
man penetrate, wherever the heavens overshadow and the
Earth sustain, wherever the sun and moon shine,
wherever frost and dew fall. All who have life and
breath will honor and love him. Therefore we may say,
"He is the equal of God."
It is only he in this world, who has realized his
absolute self, that can order and adjust the great
relations of human society, fix the fundamental
principles of morality, and understand the laws of
growth and reproduction of the universe.
Q.
Do
you feel that individual transformations are part of
an expansion of global consciousness?
JB.
At the risk of sounding painfully optimistic, I have
to say that when I look at the global crisis that we’re
in the middle right now — the holocausts that are
going on, the epidemic of AIDS, the gross inhumanity
to wards human beings that we see — the sense I have
is that it is a big dark night of the soul. I’m a
fan of the dark night because I believe in what
Meister Eckehart, the Christian mystic, said: "At
the darkest moment, that’s when the dawn is going to
come." And I think we’re right there. There’s
a physicist whose name is Ilya Prigogine, who won the
Nobel Prize for what’s called the Theory of
Dissipative Structures. And that is [about] the way
that progress happens, the way that transformation
occurs: it is always when the old system just explodes
and goes to pieces. At that moment, we can have a
quantum leap as the energy comes forth in a new way
and jumps to what he calls "a higher level of
organization." I think that that’s where we are
right now: we’re in the middle of one of these
quantum leaps to a higher level of organization, and
what is going to fuel that leap, I think, is the
emerging spiritual sense that so many people have.”
Angels:
The Mysterious Messengers
Ballantine Books, New
York, 1994 p. 72-3.)
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