Aum Gung
Ganapathaye Namah
Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samma-sambuddhassa
Homage to The Blessed One, Accomplished and
Fully Enlightened
In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most
Merciful
Moses
A Collection of Articles, Notes and References
References
(Revised:
References Edited by
An Indian Yogi
What’s in a name? That
which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
- William Shakespeare
Copyright © 2002-2010 An
Indian Yogi
The following educational writings are STRICTLY for
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Should NOT be used for commercial, political or any
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8 "... Freely you received, freely give”.
- Matthew 10:8 :: New American Standard Bible (NASB)
1 “But mark this: There
will be terrible times in the last days.
2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their
parents, ungrateful, unholy,
3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good,
4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather
than lovers of God—
5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with
them.
6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all
kinds of evil desires,
7 always learning but never able to acknowledge
the truth.
8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses,
so also these men oppose the
truth--men of
depraved minds, who, as far as
the faith is concerned, are rejected.
9 But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those
men, their folly
will be clear to everyone.”
- 2 Timothy 3:1-9 :: New International Version
(NIV)
6 As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec.
- Hebrews 5:6 :: King James Version (KJV)
Therefore, I say:
Know your
enemy and know yourself;
in a hundred
battles, you will never be defeated.
When you
are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself,
your chances of
winning or losing are equal.
If ignorant both of your
enemy and of yourself,
you are sure to be defeated in every battle.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 500bc
There are two ends not to
be served by a wanderer. What are these two? The pursuit of desires and of the pleasure which springs from desire,
which is base, common, leading to rebirth, ignoble, and unprofitable; and the pursuit of pain and
hardship, which is grievous, ignoble, and unprofitable.
- The Blessed One, Lord Buddha
Contents
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A Brief Word on Copyright
References
Educational Copy of Some of the References
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A Brief
Word on Copyright
Many of
the articles whose educational copies are given below are copyrighted by their
respective authors as well as the respective publishers. Some contain messages
of warning, as follows:
Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are
expressly prohibited
without the written
consent of “so and
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According
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The reproduction,
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and
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Moreover,
I
believe that satisfies the conditions for copyright and non-plagiarism.
References
Some of
the links may not be active (de-activated) due to various reasons, like removal of the
concerned information from the source database. So an educational copy is also
provided, along with the link.
If the
link is active, do cross-check/validate/confirm the educational copy of the
article provided along.
References
Moses.
Jewish Virtual Library.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/moses.html
Did Moses have an Ethiopian wife? Did he have children by her?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=628
Why was Moses forbidden to enter the Promised Land?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=285
Why were Moses and Aaron punished when Moses hit the rock to get water for the people (Num. 20:8-12)?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=633
Why didn't Moses establish a dynasty?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=634
Polygamists in the Bible: Moses
http://biblicalpolygamy.com/polygamists/moses/
Moses on Mt Nebo
http://tinny.eis.net.au/~paulh/ex19hp.htm
The Order of the Nazirim
http://www.pranayama.org/nazirim.html
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Educational
Copy of Some of the References
FOR
EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
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Reference
Moses.
Jewish Virtual Library.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/moses.html
The
saddest event in Moses' life might well be God's prohibiting him from entering
the
(Reference:
Moses. Jewish Virtual Library.)
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Reference
Did Moses have an Ethiopian wife? Did he have children by her?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=628
Moses' Ethiopian wife is
mentioned in Num.12:1, but the Midrashim all say that
"Kushis" in that verse means
"beautiful" and that the wife was Jethro's
daughter Zipporah. However, Targum
Yonasan takes the Ethiopian wife literally, and the
story of Moses' marriage in
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Reference
Why was Moses forbidden to enter the Promised Land?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=285
The Midrash
Tanchuma on Deut. Ch. 3 points out that Moses sinned
six times: (1-2) By saying "Send whomever You send" (Ex. 4:13) and
"From the time I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your Name, he has done badly
by this people, and You have not saved Your people" (Ex. 5:23); in these
two instances, Moses doubted G-d. (3-4) By saying
"G-d did not send me ...and if G-d makes a special creation" (Num.
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Reference
Why were Moses and Aaron punished when Moses hit the rock to get water for the people (Num. 20:8-12)?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=633
Moses and Aaron were punished because Moses hit the rock rather than speaking to it, and Aaron didn't stop him. Also, they addressed the people in disparaging terms ("Hear now, ye rebels"); this was unwarranted, because the people were only asking for water, not rebelling.
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Reference
Why didn't Moses establish a dynasty?
http://www.torah.org/qanda/seequanda.php?id=634
Moses' sons did not become scholars and were not suited to succeed him. His disciple Joshua was therefore chosen as his successor instead, and the priesthood was given to his brother Aaron and his descendants.
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Reference
Polygamists in the Bible: Moses
http://biblicalpolygamy.com/polygamists/moses/
Penned the Pentateuch, Torah,
Genesis through Deuteronomy (which includes authoring the passages of Genesis
chapters 2 through 3, Genesis
2 Wives, Zipporah and the Ethiopian Woman
"And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter." Exodus 2:21. (See also Exodus 18:1-6.)
"And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman." Numbers 12:1
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Reference
Moses on Mt Nebo
http://tinny.eis.net.au/~paulh/ex19hp.htm
XVIII - EPILOGUE - Moses on Mt Nebo : Numbers 20:1-13; Deuteronomy 32:48-52, 34:1-8
As the Scripture readings show, Moses climbed Mt
Nebo to view the promised land ... and to die.
Try to see him ... a vigorous old man - for "his natural
force was not abated" - clambering up the rock-strewn slopes
of this high mountain to the east of the
"You shall see the land ..." From his youth he had dreamed of freedom for his people. He had devoted the whole of his long and eventful life to it. Through the years, his fiery ambition had been tempered and directed by the call of God to this one end: to bring his people into their own land, the land promised to their fathers. Today that promise is on the brink of fulfilment. For the first and only time in his life he sees it with his own eyes.
The broad river runs like a
silver ribbon northwards through the green of the great rift
valley, and stretching away to the western sea are the folded hills of
Everything in him would rise up out of the long, toilsome, desert years and exult in the sight of it all. His eyes at last beheld it, as he had been promised: "You shall see it with your eyes."
THE OCCASION
But the sight of it was made bitter-sweet
because of the thing God had gone on to say: "But you shall not go over to
it, because you broke faith with me
in the midst of the people of Israel at the waters
of Meribath-Kadesh in the wilderness of Zin; because you did not
revere me as holy in the eyes of the
people."
The memory of that day must sit
like a stone in his mind and heart as he sits silent on that peak in
It had not been the first day the people had threatened to mutiny under his leadership, nor the last. Under the good, guiding hand of God he had led them unfalteringly from one water supply to another in that sunbaked desert.
His whole task as leader, remember, had been so to lead the people that their faith should be firmly anchored in God, in His power and good purpose for them. But when they came to Meribath-Kadesh, and there was no water there, their unbelief and their mutinous spirit, expressed yet again, had been too much for him. It got to him that day that the people, when they lacked faith in God, always took it out on him. As the Psalmist later would tell it, "It went ill with Moses on their account, for they made his spirit bitter, and he spoke words that were rash." (Psalm 106:32)
"Hear now, you rebels," he snarled at them, "shall we (Aaron and I) bring forth water for you out of this rock?" And he struck the rock in anger ... twice, when God in fact had said he need only tell the rock to yield its water. (Numbers 20:7, 11)
He succumbed that day to the temptation to vindicate his own leadership in the eyes of the people, not God's. God showed him where the water was, as He had always done before, but this time, Moses hid that from the people ... guiltily concealed it. He let them think the discovery was his own. He wanted to get them off his back, you see.
It was understandable; his patience with them ran out. They had provoked him once too often ... it was the last straw.
But understandable as it was, it was wrong. The one big issue at stake through all those desert years was faith in God. And Moses had stuck to that task. Patiently, doggedly, bravely, through crisis after crisis, little by little he had built up that faith in the people's hearts. But at Meribath-Kadesh he tore down all that slow and careful building - tore it down in one rash outburst of hurt pride and peevish anger. "Why must they always take it out on me?" he thought bitterly, when he should have been thinking, "Why won't they trust God?"
In all those testing years, this was the only occasion Moses betrayed his trust. One indiscretion in a long and honourable course of otherwise unwavering faithfulness. Now he was to pay for it ... by losing out on the crowning moment. "You shall see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there, because you broke faith with me at Meribath-Kadesh, and did not honour me in the eyes of the people." Now he must see the crowning triumph given into the hands of another, of Joshua.
Does it seem a harsh thing, this decree of God? Perhaps it does.
But the truth was so vital that nothing - but nothing - must be allowed to obscure it ... the truth that GOD, not man, is to be trusted - not even the man Moses. And not even compassion for so good and faithful a servant as Moses had been must blur the truth, that it is God men and women must trust.
THE RELEVANCE OF THE OCCASION
Now here, surely, there is summed up all the tragic element in life. One betrayal - just one betrayal amid the long years of faithfulness - and the precious dream was lost. "You shall see the land before you, but you shall not go over there."
That is a sentence that could be written over so much of our own lives. Of how much - of how very much - could it be said in our lives that we have seen it with our eyes, but we shall not go over there?
This element of loss, this dimension of disappointment, this feature of frustration is reflected, for example, in the cynicism with which we speak of New Year resolutions. Our resolve in the past has been so big and our achievement so small ... and our failures so repeated. Resolutions now are futile. We saw it with our eyes, but we shall not go over. Not now. It is reflected too in our habit of worrying. Life's stubborn refusal to match our dream breeds an attitude of mind in which we expect the worst. We can see this mood of dull resignation written on faces in any crowd we care to watch, at a bus stop or on a railway station. So much they have seen with their eyes, but their feet will never tread where their eyes have travelled. It is reflected too in what modern jargon refers to as the mid-life crisis. Our dreams of achievement, of success, of rank, of honour, of glowing pride in our children - all these and more have been worn down by the disappointing and frustrating years. It has been borne in upon us relentlessly that you can gain ground in one direction only by losing it in another; or else, having achieved your ambitions, they turn out to be not at all satisfying as we had believed. It affects us too at the moral and spiritual levels, so that we are tempted to despair - not so much of life as of ourselves. We all dreamed once ... of the people we would be; of heroism and nobility and splendid self-sacrifice. But we have learned with the passage of the years that we are not made of such stuff at all. We have been weak, and cowardly, and selfish, and self-indulgent; we've lied and cheated and compromised. So much we have seen with our eyes, but we shall not go over there.
Not that it has all been our own
fault. Often it has not been. It has been the fault of others. It has. It is
worth reflecting that our Lord Himself suffered the sort of disappointment, the
frustration that others bring down on our dreams.
What are we to make of all this? If our life lies under the heavy hand of such remorseless frustration, what is there to be hoped for?
Professor H. H. Farmer, in a sermon to which I owe much of the insight I am sharing with you, recalled a student who said to him once, "The terrible thing about life to me is that mistakes and failures are never forgiven." When he asked her what she meant, she said, "I mean: if you take a wrong turning in life, you can never go back to where you were and take the right one; your life is ever after determined by that false move. If you fail in some task or responsibility, you are ever afterwards the person who failed in that task, in that responsibility, and the opportunity will never come again. You and others must bear the consequences. If you sin, you can't go back and not sin at that particular point. All your subsequent life has to be determined in some degree by that failure. And since we all make mistakes, and take wrong turnings, and do disloyal things, and fail to realise our ambitions, the world for all of us is just a colossal 'might-have-been', an irredeemable, third rate ruin of a place, a graveyard of dead and unresurrectable desires." ("The Healing Cross" H. H. Farmer, Nisbet 1943, from the sermon "Life's Frustrations" p. 73)
Do we feel that we are all in the same wretched boat with Moses?
THE LESSON TO BE DRAWN FROM THE OCCASION
But there is a hidden fault in that despairing view of things. What is wrong with it is that it misses altogether the real point of life. That view of things holds good only if the whole point of life is to build an unblemished record of outward accomplishment. It is blind, quite blind to the whole dimension of inward growth that goes on underneath it. Success or failure is not measured in the end by the surface accomplishments of a person's life, but by the quality of spirit to which he or she has attained in and through his struggles. What matters in the end is not success or failure, but the character that has been won out of both, and especially out of failure. We are prone to be obsessed with the outward appearance of a person's life. That is not what God looks at. God looks on the heart. It is by how the heart is growing, not how the record is growing, that He rates us. The whole point of life as God ordained it is that out of it all, success and failure alike, there should be fashioned in us a heart 'far gone in readiness for Him.' The actual course of our pilgrimage is quite a secondary thing beside that. Wrong turnings, failures, disappointments, blind alleys and all the rest can be made to serve the real purpose of living just as effectively as right decisions, successes and good fortune if, by our reaction to them, God is able to fashion in us hearts full of compassion, of humility, of patience, of sympathy, of courage and kindly wisdom.
"Men are looking for a better life; God is looking for better men." (E. M. Bounds) We aspire to success in outward achievements; God's successes are in the soul, and often God wins His successes in a person's soul precisely when, and even because, the outward shell of their life is in ruins. It is out of tragedy that men grow big, not out of comedy! It is not the Rogers and Hammerstein musical that you gives us a sense of a man's greatness, but the Shakespeare tragedy.
Let me make the point by inviting you first to give Moses' life an imaginary twist, so he becomes the hero of a musical comedy, and then contrast that with the real Moses we see in the pages of the Bible.
Imagine first the Moses who never was - the Moses who made no mistake, the Moses who did not fail, but achieved all he set out to do ... led his people over the Jordan in triumph with trumpets and banners into the promised land. His years come to an end crowded with honours, made pleasant with tributes and leisure, freed at last in honourable retirement from the burden of responsibility. We see him a grand old man, but idle at the end, like a once splendid race horse put out to grass!
Now by contrast, look at the real
Moses, sitting there silent and alone on a peak in
What is going on in his mind and heart as he sits there, gazing out over the land he will never enter? Is he bitter? Is he wishing he had never started on this venture which now he will never finish? Does it gall him that the hour of triumph will now be given into other hands than his own? Is he feeling sick and angry that so heavy a sentence should have been passed on him for that one moment of weakness? Does it all seem so bitterly unfair?
Or has all that been fought through in his soul a long time since, so that he is able now to view the promised land with a quiet contentment, satisfied that God has kept faith with his people, and grateful to have been given any part in it at all?
Have the evil spirits of bitterness and rebellion and self-despising and envy all been wrestled with and cast out, so he is content with what God has willed?
We can not tell. But we know that all these things have been at issue in this man's soul, and we sense the greatness of a human spirit in which such battles have been fought; and if they have been won, these battles, then Moses' spirit has been (to use a marvellous phrase of H. H. Farmer's) "frustrated into sublimity." Solemn realities have been at issue in his heart, and his life has been lifted far above mere triviality. The tragedy of his life's end gives us an insight, as a happy ending could not, into the greatness of soul which a man may reach, or miss, through his struggle with adversity. We say again that what matters in the end is not success or failure, but the character that is won out of both, and more especially out of failure.
So we may not say that Moses' struggles were all rendered meaningless by that last sad shortfall from their final fulfilment. If he yields up his spirit to God, there in the mountain top solitude, in a spirit of meekness, in calm acceptance of God's will, knowing that the biggest truth in life - that it is God we must trust - has been better learned through his very sin and this consequence of it ... if he knows that and is well content with the loss of what was so precious to him for the greater glory of God and the greater benefit of mankind, then that last hour on the mountain is the crowning hour of his life. That day the heart of Moses, the friend of God, was made perfect.
So let us take a stride forward
in conformity to the will of God. What does it matter whether we end up a
distinguished celebrity or an insignificant nobody? What does it matter whether
we have realised 8% or 80% of our youthful dreams?
What does it matter if we lead
We may pour some Christian content into Kipling's familiar lines: "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same ... you'll be a man, my son."
Home Intro Ch. 1
This material is copyright; it may not be published, quoted or reproduced without permission, nor may it be preached without acknowledgment!
(Reference: Moses on Mt Nebo.)
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Personal
Note
When
you read the above accounts of Moses, you might feel that Moses was just
“another prophet” like many others mentioned in the Old Testament. Now go
through the following account of Prophet Moses, as given by Paul Brunton, in his A Search in Secret
Written
around
Revised
around
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Reference (Key points only)
The Order of the Nazirim
http://www.pranayama.org/nazirim.html
The Order of the Nazirim is a mystical order that combines
the practices of pranayama with periods of celibacy
and tantra. It was organized
over 3,200 years ago by the Hebrew prophet Moses. Nazir means
"monk" in Hebrew. In contrast to the tantra
craze of today in the West, the Order of the Nazirim
(plural form of nazir) was established
by Moses to moderate sexual activity by offering a balanced path between
unregulated sexual habits and a life of strict celibacy. Shimshon (Samson), most of the
Hebrew yogi/prophets, and Jesus of
Moses understood that a balance needed to be struck between strict celibacy and uncontrolled sexual activity. Monks and nuns who observe celibacy for their entire lives often display neuroses resulting from an unsublimated sexual drive. Ideally, only those who have attained complete self-mastery will become lifelong celibates. Otherwise, hypocrisy, scandal, law-suits, and the cult of personality is the sure result. Those who become celibate and live in monastic confines, but still harbor unsatisfied sexual desires, often display neurotic behavior in the form of overindulgence in another sense pleasure, generally in the unhealthy indulgence in food. Such individuals may even become zealous fanatics in their dogmatic beliefs regarding sex and attempt to force their extreme self-denial on others. The negative disposition toward the body that was displayed in the Christian West for hundreds of years, causing untold emotional and physical damage, resulted from such extremely negative attitudes toward sex.
Further, the concrete evidence that moderated sexual activity promotes better health -- physical, mental, and emotional -- can no longer be denied. Puritanical attitudes toward the body have been found to create violent tendencies in children. Imbalanced and unscientific ideas toward sex are adhered to today in many religious circles without any consideration for the emotional and even social consequences. The ideals of the Nazir Order does counsel young adults under the age of 18 to refrain from sex, but pre-marital sex is not an issue.
Parents are encouraged to consistently hug and caress their infants and children lest unhealthy tendencies result. The absence of physical affection promotes the R-Complex in the brain, which promotes violence. Violence, therefore, is a direct byproduct of a society's religiously informed body-negative disposition. This violence, in turn, promotes more child abuse, the turning of sex from a nurturing to aggressive act, murder, and sectarian religious belief systems that are themselves both sources and reflections of all of the above. Scientists like Carl Sagan have gone so far as to say that raising one's children according to such warped views is a crime against humanity as it produces all grades of criminals. Indeed, the practice of tantra and celibacy later in life are made easier for children if they are given ample amounts of tender physical contact.
In short, the practice of abstinence, per se, is unsound. Only those who have entirely lifted the prana to the brain, and have locked it there, can safely do away with sex. Of course, such individuals need not consciously abstain from sex inasmuch as they no longer desire sex. Considering the few yoga masters (Paramahansa Yogananda, Svami Vivekananda) that embodied freedom from all sexual ambitions, and the number of acts of sexual misconduct perpetrated by countless so-called gurus and "meditation masters," students interested in the genuine yogic life are wise to take heed and strike a healthy and honest balance in regard to sex. In short, the practice of abstinence as a means to attain celibacy in thought, not merely in the body, is ineffective and often debilitating.
At the same time, the advantages of periods of celibacy coupled with periods of tantra, where the ultimate goal of the two being to lift the current from the base of the spine to the brain through pranayama, can hardly be overestimated. The higher Nazir path of periods of celibacy and periods of tantra is both more effective and more universally practicable.
Further, unregulated sexual behavior is debilitating to the spiritual life. The mastery of prana, the senses, the mind, and breath is made impossible by unregulated sexuality. While pranayama endeavors to lift the current of consciousness up to the brain, sex pulls the energy down and out. Overstimulation of the genitals leads to raw nerves, a weakening of all the sense faculties, and mundane consciousness.
In the course of one lifetime, the Nazir will gradually effect a change in the consciousness and lift the current to the brain. The result will be a natural freedom from sexual ambitions. Celibacy will then be effortless, not pathology producing.
The Order of the Nazirim has been practically lost for thousands of years. A Kabbalist, Christian mystic, a yogi or monk of Buddhist or Hindu tradition, or a Sufi, here and there, may have taken the Nazir vow, or a variation of it, for a period. However, any form of sexual abstinence was widely discouraged by later Judaism as the commandment to be fruitful and multiply took precedence. Further, the mystical techniques of the Nazirim have been lost. To boot, many of the details concerning the overt rituals of the Order are outdated and have never been distilled to their basic principles and properly reintroduced for our present age.
For example, in the days of Moses
women were allowed to be Nazirot (pl. fem. of nazir), but they had to ask the consent of their husbands.
Men, however, did not have to receive the consent of their wives. This practice
was meant to insure that there would never be a shortage of progeny. Today, the
Nazir Order need not worry that its practices may
cause an underpopulation in the world. Indeed, the widespread adoption of the principles of the Nazir Order in relation to sex would help to reduce the population of the human race until it reached a more healthy balance.
Continuing, many injunctions necessarily served the ecclesiatical authority, such as the practice of giving the Order compensations of different kinds. However, the Nazir Order as presented through The Pranayama Institute is waiving such culturally informed protocols but is reconstituting the ideals behind these injunctions to fit modern sensibilities.
…
(Reference: The
Order of the Nazirim.)
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“Thou belongest
to That Which
Is Undying, and not merely to time alone,” murmured the Sphinx, breaking its muteness at last. “Thou art
eternal, and not merely
of the vanishing flesh. The soul in man cannot be killed, cannot die. It waits, shroud-wrapped,
in thy heart, as I waited,
sand-wrapped, in thy world. Know thyself, O mortal! For there is One within thee, as in all men, that
comes and stands at the bar and bears
witness that there IS a God!”
(Reference: Brunton, Paul. (1962) A Search in Secret
Amen