THE QUALITY OF MERCY
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) of Stratford-upon-Avon is England's, and the world's, most noted playwright. Shakespeare lived during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth l (1558-1603) and King James l (1603-1625), who commissioned the Authorized King James Version of the Holy Bible, published in 1611.
William was born to John and Mary Shakespeare, one of eight children. The only record available is his baptism at Holy Trinity Church on April 26, 1564. It is evident from his plays that he was moved by his studies of Greek and Latin classics. He married Anne Hathaway at age eighteen, and they had three children, Susanna, and the twins Hamnet and Judith. The death of his only son Hamnet at age eleven was devastating for Shakespeare, and proved a powerful influence on his Tragedy Hamlet.
Shakespeare's popularity rests on his perceptive understanding of human nature. The 36 plays published in the First Folio are generally divided into Tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, MacBeth, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra; Comedies, as The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer's Night Dream, Love's Labour Lost, As You Like It, All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, and the Taming of the Shrew; the Comedies known as Romances such as The Winter's Tale and one of his last plays The Tempest, one of the themes being the painful necessity of a father letting his daughter go; and Histories, such as King Henry V, King Richard the Second, the Life and Death of King John, All Is True (on Henry VIII), and King Henry IV, noted for the comical character Falstaff. He is also noted for his 154 Sonnets, A Lover's Complaint, and other poems.
This beautiful piece on mercy is from The Merchant of Venice, first performed in 1596 and published in 1600, when Portia speaks to Shylock in Act IV, Scene I.
The Quality of Mercy
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice.
William Shakespeare
1600
I AM THE OPPOSITE OF THE OPPOSITE I AM
THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITE IS THE AM I ALWAYS AM
SUPER SCIENCE
Michael White
1
999
"The alchemists, Jung believed had been inadvertantly tapping into the collective unconscious. This led them to assume / Page 99 / they were following a spiritual path to enlightenment-when they were actuafly liberatiing their subconscious minds through the use of ritual. This is not far removed from other ritualistic events- those exploited by faith healers, the ecstasy experienced by ritualistic voodoo dancers, or charismatic Christian services. Jung said of alchemy: 'The alchemical stone symbolises something that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some alchemists 'Compared to the mystical experience of God within one's own soul.It tusually takes prolonged suffering to burn away all the superfluous psychic elements.concealing the stone. But some profound inner experience of the Self does occur to most people at least once in a lifetime. From the psychological standpoint, a genuinely religious atiitude consists of an effort to discover this unique. experience and;gradually to keep in tune wth it (it is,relevant that the stone is itself something permanent), so that the Self becomes an inner partner towards whom one's attention is continually turned.'5 To the alchemist, the most important factor in the practice was participation of the individual experimenter in .the process of transmutation. The genuine alchemist was convinced that the emotional and spiritual characteristics of the individual experimenter was involved intiimately wth the success or failure of the experiment. And, it is this concept, more than any other aspect of, alchemy, that distinguishes it from orthodox chemistry,- the scientific discipline that began to supersede it at the end of the seventeenth Century. The alchemist placed inordinate importance upon the spiritual element.of his work and for many sceptics it was this which.pushed the subject into the realms of magic and left it forever beyond the boundaries of 'science'."
THE GARDEN OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER
THE JOURNEY TO SPIRITUAL FULFILMENT
Longfield Beatty 1939
Where is the root of the Golden Flower?
In the garden of the Two Trees.
And where does the Bower bloom?
In the Purple Hall of the City of Jade.
Where is this garden?
In the seed water, the moat of the City.
When does the Bower bloom?
At the end of the far journey.
What journey?
From water to fire, earth to gold, serpent to eagle;
from father to mother, mother to son, son to father.
And the cost of the journey?
The blood of father, mother, and son.
Blood, then, is a password?
No, only the Sphinx can teach the password."
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
WE
R
THE DEAD LONG TIME AGO WE LIVED SAW DAWN FELT SUNSET GLOW AND NOW
?
Brahma
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.
R.W.Emerson
Bhagavad-Gita
Text 19
" ya enam vetti hantaram
yas cainam manyate hatam
ubhau tau na vijanito
nayam hanti na hanyate"
Bhagavad-Gita
As it is.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Translation Chapter 2 Page 99/100
"Neither he who thinks the living entity the slayer nor he who thinks it slain is in knowledge, for the self slays not nor is slain."
‘who is the slayer and who is the victim. Speak’,
Sophocles
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
Fragments of an Unknown Teaching
P.D.Oupensky 1878- 1947
Page 217
" 'A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.' "
" 'When a man awakes he can die; when he dies he can be born' "
A MAN MAY BE BORN BUT IN ORDER TO BE BORN HE MUST FIRST DIE
SUPERNATURAL
Graham Hancock 2003
For my Father Donald M. Hancock, 7 December 1924 - 16 September 2003.
Ride in green pastures
Page
"Drugs and genuine religious experiences
It is Benny Shanon's controversial view that 'all the paradigmatic characteristics of the mystical experience are encountered
with ayahuasca . . .'75 He also asks if the 'meaning and value of religious and spiritual experience induced by the ingestion of psychoactive agents' are 'comparable to the experiences of mystics attained without external agents', and replies: 'My
empirical study of ayahuasca leads me to answer with a categorical "yes".'76
It may at first seem absurd that anything like a genuine religious experience could be induced by activities as simple and apparently as materialistic as eating, drinking or smoking certain species of plants. But we should feel less surprised when we remember that the plants in question contain chemicals intimately related to brain hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. Although the neurological details are difficult to grasp, the fact is that these chemicals and others like them are intrinsic to all the functions of our brains, while our brains in turn are involved in everything we experience even if we choose to define some of those experiences as real and some as non-real. Whether we like it or not, in other words, and whether or not we augment them or tinker with their balance in any way, it is beyond serious dispute that these chemicals already play a fundamental role in spontaneous (i.e., non-drug-induced) religious experiences. And since such spontaneous experiences occasioned by brain chemistry are regarded as genuine, then there is no reason why the deliberate induction of the same brain chemistry with hallucinogens should result in experiences that are any less genuine.
It was for this exact reason that Aldous Huxley, who had no doubt of their mystical and religious value, often referred to hallucinogens as 'gratuitous graces'.77 Those of us reared in / Page 629 / puritanical moral climates might feel that we cannot possibly deserve something so wonderful and enlightening as a religious experience without working and suffering for it, but this is not a logical position. Besides, no matter how powerful the hallucinogen we may consume, the truth is that we will not have a religious experience with it unless we have prepared ourselves properly and have indeed made ourselves in some way deserving.
Huston Smith, the renowned American scholar of religions, agrees that many drug experiences may be entirely lacking in religious features: 'They can be sensual as readily as spiritual, trivial as readily as transforming, capricious as readily as sacramental.'78 Nevertheless he reports recent research which demonstrates that under the right circumstances with properly prepared subjects, drugs can and do induce religious experiences that are indistinguishable from such experiences that occur spontaneously. . . The way the statistics are currently running, it looks as if from one-fourth to onethird of the general population will have religious experiences if they take certain drugs under naturalistic conditions. . . Among subjects who have strong religious proclivities, the proportion of those who have religious experiences jumps to three-fourths. If such subjects take the drugs in religious settings, the percentage soars to nine out of ten.79
I feel compelled to re-emphasise at this point that my full acceptance of the role that brain chemistry plays in consciousness does not mean that I think brain chemistry causes consciousness or that religious experiences - whether or nor induced by hallucinogens or other means - are necessarily 'made up' in the brain. I see no evidence for such reductionism. The alternative model that I have adopted throughout this book is of the brain as a biochemical and bioelectric receiver that may be 'retuned' / Page 630 / by a variety of techniques to allow attention to be paid to other levels of reality not normally accessible to our consciousness. Those 'retuning' techniques include the use of hallucinogenic drugs combined with the skilful manipulation of the 'set' and 'setting' of participants to generate maximum sensitivity and openness on their part. so inspired by the progress that David Lewis-Williams has made cracking the visionary code of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, more and more scholars are coming to suspect that the answers to some of the greatest mysteries of antiquity may lie in further research into the role of hallucinogens in triggering spiritual experiences. It seems that very often those experiences were sought in theatrically staged subterranean settings, selected, like the caves themselves, to maximise visionary 'retuning' of the brain. Specific suggestions have been made on the basis of large bodies of convincing evidence that the religions of ancient Greece, ancient India, ancient Egypt, and the ancient Maya of Central America - to name but a few - were rooted and grounded in direct spiritual experiences that the devotees themselves attained through the use of psycho active plants. If this is so, then one would expect to find many strong shamanistic traces in all of these religions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out that we do, and that in a number of cases it is even possible to identify the specific hallucinogens that were used.
The end of life and its god-sent beginning
Barely half an hour's drive outside the modern city of Athens lies the ancient shrine of Eleusis, humbled and in ruins now but once the centre of the most famous 'mystery cult' of antiquity, dedicated to the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The myth tells the story of Demeter's journey to the underworld / Page 631 / to claim back from death the soul of her daughter Persephone - a shamanic mission that honours the forces of life, rebirth and regeneration. So vital were these forces held to be that once a year, in our month of September, thousands of pilgrims from all parts of Greece used to converge on Eleusis, where it was believed that the living Persephone had burst forth from the earth. The terminus of their journey was the great Telestrion, the darkened Hall of Initiation, with its forest of columns, focused around an inner enclosure known as the Anaktoron, from which, at the climax of the ceremonies, a figure apparently materialised 'in the midst of a great light'.81 The figure was often construed as that of Persephone 'returning from the dead with her new-born son conceived in the land of death'.82
It is hard work to discover anything else about the visions that the pilgrims saw at Eleusis. The shrine was astonishingly successful at guarding its mystery over a period that some authorities suggest may have been as long as 2,000 years of continuous functioning before it was finally closed by Christian diktat in the fourth century AD. 83 Hundreds of thousands passed through its gates down the ages, including some of the most famous names of Classical Greece, such as Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, but almost everyone stayed very quiet about what they had seen - which, indeed, they were obliged to keep secret 'on pain of death or banishment'. 84 We have few specifics, therefore, but from many of the pilgrims there have survived more general reports telling us that the rituals at Eleusis and the visions seen there were transformatory and that afterwards they were never the same as before. Very commonly they claimed to have utterly lost their fear of death and to be prepared for life beyond it in the land of shadows. In the words of Sophocles after his initiation at Eleusis: 'Thrice happy are those of mortals, who having seen those rites depart for Hades; for to them alone is granted to have a true life there. For the rest, all there is / Page 632 / evil.'85 The poet Pindar likewise said that what he had seen validated the continuity of existence beyond the grave, and that he had learned great truths from his experience at Eleusis:86 'Happy is he who, having seen these rites, goes below the hollow earth; for he knows the end of life and he knows its god-sent beginning.'87
As archaeologist George Mylonas puts it, when we read these and many other similar statements by the great and nearly great of the ancient world:
We cannot help but believe that the Mysteries of Eleusis were not an empty, childish affair devised by shrewd priests to fool the peasant and the ignorant, but a philosophy of life that possessed substance and meaning and imparted a modicum of truth to the human soul. That belief is strengthened when we read in Cicero that Athens has given nothing to the world more excellent or divine than the Eleusinian Mysteries. Let us recall again that the rites of Eleusis were held for some two thousand years; that for two thousand years civilised humanity was sustained and ennobled by those rites. Then we shall be able to appreciate the meaning and importance of Eleusis . . .88
Mylonas was certain that the shrine succeeded so spectacularly for so long because it 'satisfied the most sincere yearnings and deepest longings of the human heart'89 - but neither he nor anyone else when he wrote these words in 1961 really had the faintest idea how it managed to pull off a trick like that. It's all very well to hint that it must have had something to do with 'a philosophy oflife', but a philosophy takes time to absorb, while it is clear that what all the pilgrims were struck and transformed by at Eleusis was a powerful and immediate experience that they went through during their night inside the Telestrion and that seems to / Page 633 / have included visions seen, sounds heard and supernatural beings encountered.
The oath of secrecy and the passage of thousands of years means that the pickings are thin in the relatively limited range of primary sources on Eleusis that have come down to us. Nevertheless, scattered here and there, some clues have survived that have helped researchers build up a clearer picture of what was really going on inside the Telestrion. Aristotle confIrms that it was 'an experience rather than something learned'.9O The pilgrim Sopater tells us that he saw a schema ti, 'a form or appearance of some kind hovering above the ground'. 91 Plato was perhaps a little more explicit when he spoke of phantasmata or ghostly apparitions, while Pausanias records that the initiation hall 'became filled with spirits'.92 Also relevant are the physical symptoms reported by many:
fear and trembling in the limbs, vertigo, nausea, and a cold sweat. Then there came the vision, a sight amidst an aura of brilliant light that suddenly flickered through the darkened chamber. Eyes had never before seen the like. . . The division between earth and sky melted into a pillar of light.93