Odilia Carmen Chirica

also known as TALAVAKARA-UPANISHAD or KENOPANISHAD for further details check wikipedia FIRST KHANDA  1. The Pupil asks: 'At whose wish does the mind sent forth proceed on its errand? At whose command does the first breath go forth? At whose wish do we utter this speech? What god directs the eye, or the ear?' 2. The Teacher replies: 'It is the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of speech, the breath of breath, and the eye of the eye. When freed (from the senses) the wise, on departing from this world, become immortal. 3. 'The eye does not go thither, nor speech, nor mind. We do not know, we do not understand, how any one can teach it.  4. 'It is different from the known, it is also above the unknown, thus we have heard from those of old, who taught us this. 5. 'That which is not expressed by speech and by which speech is expressed, that alone know as Brahman, not that which people here adore. 6. 'That which does not think by mind, and by which, ...

"The name of Shri Bhagavan Dattatreya has occurred sometimes in these essays, but he is still practically unknown outside India. More lamentable still is the fact that although still worshipped by millions of Hindus he is thought of more as a benevolent God rather than a teacher of the highest essence of Indian thought. In the basic essence which runs through the 3 patterns of thought which I have classified as the Diamond Dharmas, we find their earliest expression in the Guru teachings of Dattatreya, which preceded them all and later became embraced in Brahma Vidya. Shri Dattatreya was a dropout of an earlier age than the period when Veda and Tantra merged to become one single cult. It was men like Dattatreya who helped to make this possible. Three of his close disciples were kings, one an Asura, and the other two belonging to the warrior caste. Dattatreya himself was regarded as an avatar of Maheshwara ( Shiva ), but later was claimed by Vaishnavas as the avatar of Vishnu. Not s...

by  St Bonaventure INTRODUCTION St Bonaventure was a Franciscan Monk born in central Italy in 1217. He joined the Order in 1243, and wrote a number of masterpieces including a biography of St Francis, and many other treatises. The most widely-known of his works is that dealt with here, "The Soul's Journey into God", a dense  summa  of medieval Christian spirituality. It is based on a vision of the Seraph, the six-winged angelic creature which had provided St Francis his critical mystical experience, and it was whilst meditating on this vision that St Bonaventure realised that "...this vision represented our father's rapture in contemplation and the road by which that rapture is reached." The actual Latin title of this work is  Itinerarium mentis in Deum , and it is of interest to this present work that Itinerarium can be translated as "plan for a journey (itinerary), which is part of the function served by any initiatory sys...