“Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world.
The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same.
Every wonderful sight will vanish; every sweet word will fade,
But do not be disheartened,
The source they come from is eternal, growing,
Branching out, giving new life and new joy.
“Why do you weep?
The source is within you.
And this whole world is springing up from it.”
 
Rumi –

Dear Friends,
  Good Wishes at this Time of the Equinox,  here are a few thoughts, which I hope the Readers will enjoy.
Yours Sincerely
Samten de Wet

“. . . for many people the lack of relevant or intelligent media coverage, of political parties manipulating public opinion and encouraging anger and multi-cultural flare-ups that few really understand, can challenge their world views and undermine their psychology and belief systems in unusual ways.”

“It's said, for instance, that we're in a change of age. And as the ages change, those old things that seemed to be great virtues suddenly become vices. The 2000 years that preceded this was the great expansion of the West, and the age of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yet these three salvational prophecies with their tremendous aesthetic accomplishments and enormous civilizing effects have turned into monsters in their self-absorption with their righteousness and orthodoxies. They lack insight; all three claim to be "the one."

  "Buddhism became known to the Western world at a rather critical period, when the West expected scientific thought and rational argument to further morality and religious contentment. It accepted the Christian code, whether practiced or not, as the norm of moral action, the Christian religion as a way of salvation, and reduced philosophy to a purely academic pursuit. The possibility that philosophy might provide guidance in conduct, and that as a way of life and quest for meaning it might involve the whole of man and not merely his brain, was overlooked. This parochialism was fortified by repression and puritanism; the assurance with which the prejudices against everything that did not agree with this pattern were voiced, greatly assisted the habit of identifying human with Western nature."

"The majority of the world does not find its roots in Western culture or traditions. The majority of the world finds its roots in the Natural World, and it is the Natural World, which must prevail if we are to develop truly free and egalitarian societies.
It is necessary, at this time, that we begin a process of critical analysis of the West's historical processes, to seek out the actual nature of the roots of the exploitative and oppressive conditions which are forced upon humanity. At the same time, as we gain understanding of those processes, we must reinterpret that history to the people of the world. It is the people of the West ultimately who are the most oppressed and exploited. They are burdened by the weight of centuries of racism, sexism, and ignorance which has rendered their people insensitive to the true nature of their lives." 

From: "A Basic Call to Consciousness" - The Hau de no sau nee Address to the Western World, delivered at The United Nations, Geneva, 1977.

 “All conscious psychic processes may well be causally explicable; but the creative act, being rooted in the immensity of the unconscious, will forever elude our attempt at understanding. It describes itself only in its manifestations; it can be guessed at, but never wholly grasped. Psychology and aesthetics will always have to turn to one another for help, and the one will not invalidate the other.”
 
Collected Works, Volume 15, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature 135

ANCIENT  MONUMENTS:

Mantras, invariably regarded as ancient and occupying a realm "beyond language," are invariant across linguistic boundaries and are used in a manner which is different from linguistic expressions: for example, in the contexts of ritual, chant, recitation or meditation, the distinction between meaningful and meaningless, which is basic to language, is irrelevant to their use. Mantras often consist of fragments, and are repeated endlessly, or reduced to nothing. In all these respects it looks as if mantras are the vestiges of something different from language that originated for a different purpose or in response to a different challenge. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are analogies in structure, function and status between mantras and bird songs.

 Frits Staal, Mantras and Bird Songs, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 105, No. 3, Indological Studies Dedicated to Daniel H. H. Ingalls (Jul. - Sep., 1985), pp. 549-558.

We... call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.
The above words are taken from the Charter for Compassion. It is evident that we live in complicated and troubled times but the Charter and the work of the Charter is about bringing us back to respecting and honoring those with whom we live.  The Charter is about civility-acting with consideration and care--towards others. The Charter is about hope and building peace.  WEBSITE HERE.

 “As living social phenomena the beat and hippie movements are now part of history, or survive on the margins as vestigial remnants, but in all sorts of ways their legacy lives on, not least in the popularity of Asian philosophies. Though the utopian rhetoric has cooled, and the revolutionary given way to apolitical pragmatism, the quest for personal authenticity and for a new form of spiritual growth has continued to preoccupy later generations, and indeed in many respects the Eastward search for alternatives to home-grown philosophies has if anything gained in depth and seriousness.”
 Clarke, J.J., Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asia and Western Thought London: Routledge, 1997,  p. 105. 

   Universally recognized as an emblem for medicine: a staff with curved lines about it, the caduceus. In the sign language of airports, it indicates the first-aid station.
 
   The figure belongs to two traditions, separate but convergent. The great physician of Greek mythology was Asklepios. His symbol was a staff entwined with a snake. But why a snake, which many view with revulsion or horror? Snakes emerge from the ground, evoking images of death and menace but also subterranean knowing, the genius of place, chthonic wisdom. They live at the boundary between the living and the dead, and they signify power and knowledge coming from the earth. In the time before the advent of the Olympian gods, the twelve led by Zeus, snakes had been worshiped as healers. Snakes in ancient (pre-Hellenic) Crete were fed at household altars, an appeasement or supplication, and later Zeus himself was sometimes worshiped as a snake. Cecrops, the legendary first king of Athens, was born from the earth and was half-man, half-snake—or perhaps he was a snake. Any knowledge embodied in a snake may be dangerous. The goddess Athena gave the daughters of Cecrops a newborn babe in a chest, forbidding them to open it. When they defied her order, they found the infant king Erichthonius surrounded by snakes, or found that the child was part-snake—and were destroyed. The association of snakes with divine power is not unique to Greece. The deities of the Yorubas, in West Africa, included a benevolent serpent-god, Da, sometimes represented as coiling about a staff, or as two snakes coiling about each other. Da comes to the New World as Damballah, a Haitian deity definitively represented as two entwined snakes. The Mesopotamian healing god Ningishizida was symbolized by two snakes, and a sacrificial goblet of ca. 2600 BC depicts two serpents entwined about each other. Indian mythology connects snakes with water, the giver of life. Serpent kings or demi gods, nagas, embody and symbolize the life-energy of water. Women seeking fertility offer votives in the form of stone slabs engraved with images of serpents, entwined serpent pairs, or half-human half snake creatures. And the supreme deity Vishnu reposes on the great serpent Ananta, whose name means "endless."
 
   Judaism recognizes an ambiguity in the healing power of snakes. The Book of Numbers, describing the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert, tells of a plague:
 

And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said: "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that He take away the serpents from us." And Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said unto Moses, "Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it up upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live." And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole; and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived." (Num. 21:6-9)

 
Here, the snake brings illness but can also bear it away. Snakes have a double nature, at the boundary between the upper and lower worlds, between air and earth. They are messengers between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Their sexual overtones owe partly to their phallic resemblance, but also to this intermediary role between spirit and flesh. Asklepios himself had an ambiguous nature, between spirit and flesh. Hesiod tells how his mother was a mortal beloved of Apollo; but she, pregnant with the gods son, had intercourse with a mortal man. Artemis, Apollo's stern sister, struck her dead; but Apollo rescued his son from the dead mother's womb and sent him to be raised by Chiron, the wise centaur. Asklepios learns well and becomes physician supreme; but he overreaches and raises the dead. Outraged, Zeus destroys the physician with a thunderbolt. Thus the story comes full circle. The mortal wife, bearing immortal seed, prefers a mortal man and is destroyed. The physician, conceived of a god, seeks the nature of a god and is destroyed. The story is also told of Melampus, whose servants killed a mother snake. He sought her children and nursed them to health. They in gratitude licked his ears clean, so that he could understand the language of animals. Some traditions make him a seer, others a healer. He hears from some wood-worms that a roof is about to collapse, and he learns from vultures why the king's son is impotent. Again, the snakes endow him with special knowledge that connects him with life, and with an earthly sphere, a knowledge of humble origins but great power.
 
  But there is another great tradition of snakes entwined about a staff. This is the caduceus of Hermes, a winged staff with two entwined snakes. This symbol began as the keryx, the heralds staff, a rod adorned in ribbons or garlands. These signified the inviolability of the ambassador. Hermes was the god of messengers, also of trades men, also of thieves. He was a quick-witted, shrewd god, verging on sly but generally good humored. Hermes is an adjuvant god, more a helper to other gods than a hero or doer of great deeds. It is he who leads dead souls to the underworld. In time, the ribbons about his staff became serpents—always two—wrapped about the staff and facing each other.
 
  There are thus two traditions of staves with serpents. One, with a single serpent, is the staff of Asklepios, the first physician. The other, with two serpents, is the caduceus of Hermes, the clever messenger god. In the course of time, the two staves have become conflated. Thus, although some authorities quarrel over which of the two is the true symbol of medicine, and which deserves the name caduceus, in modern practice they are used interchangeably. The two heritages have merged. In the figure of Asklepios, the snake connotes wisdom emerging from deep within the earth, groundedness, spooky but potentially ethereal. The snakes of Hermes are brainier, at ease in transactions, calculating, fleet.
 
   Modern men do not worship snakes. We are too sophisticated and factual for that. But the snake-entwined staff, the caduceus, bears the mark of earlier physicians and people for whom the serpent was not an abstract emblem but a conduit to knowledge. Again and again, the gods of a vanquished people become the monsters of the conquerors. Thus Medusa, a pre-classical earth goddess, becomes a snake-haired ghoul to be slain by Hellenic heroes. (A few centuries pass, and the Roman's gods become the Christian's devils. A few more centuries, and the Christian's saints become the rationalist's demons.) The modern physician wears a caduceus on his lapel, the snakes fully vanquished and domesticated. But—they are there, and perhaps they are not dead but merely sleep. The caduceus keeps the old gods, fends off their annihilation, even as it sublimates them. The convergence of the two snake traditions, Asklepios and Hermes, seems to me very apt. The physician's work partakes of both: grounded and cerebral, animal and mercantile, wise and shrewd. They are two distinct ways of being, now joining, now separating, now joining again, a twisting dance. And both snaky traditions, Asklepios and Hermes alike, transect the boundary between life and death.

 “In a study on the water of life as bathing and drinking element, and on the ritual circumambulation of holy sites, P.C. von Korvin-Krasinski identified a unitary corpus of religious beliefs and activities which he attributed to the megalithic tradition. Its most distinctive characteristics are the Spring of Life with the Regenerating Bath, the World Tree or Life Tree, the erection of holy stones and the custom of the holy circuit. In ritual circumambulation, he saw a magical repetition of the creation, the theatrical representation of a once widespread parallel ancient myth, of which at least the knowledge of the preservation of the cosmic order - achieved through the holy circuit - has been preserved, since circumambulation indicates the movement of the sun.”