Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.

Vincent Van Gogh

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston 

My source: Instagram

In dark times, poetry and music often become more important to us, providing the kind of transcendence we need to interpret painful events in a wider context.


Cassie Werber
From Here

'Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," wrote the historian EH Carr in his landmark work, What Is History? "It is he who decides which facts to give the floor and in what order or context. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all."


Quoted by Gary Younge
on She would not be moved (The Guardian)

Swami Chinmayanandaji's thought for the day:
The most perfect characteristic in an eminently successful life seems to be integrity - an inflexible, undaunted, firm integrity. And,  also, it seems that everyone who has cultivated this trait has drawn from it many an unseen and personal advantage over others who are striving in the same field of achievement.
The nobility of integrity is not merely in its honour, sincerity, our honesty in action, but it is rooted deeper in its quality and beauty of one's intentions. If the spring of our every thought is pure and if we have the heroism to live unfailingly ever true to the great ideals in ourselves, however impractical and utopian they may be, even inspite of all immediate failures, we still have cultivated integrity.
The personality in us, thereafter, with glowing poise unfolds, and at each apparent failure, with each insurmountable obstacle met, in each moment of social criticism faced, and from all empty laughter of pithless ridicule endured, we come to steel our nobility and reinforce our determination to live the honourable life consistent with our ideals and our goals.
Such individuals alone are evolvers, all others are mere adapters - at every turn compromising with circumstances adjusting to the changing patterns of challenges. They may struggle on, as hapless slaves to their habits, but never can they come to dominate the outer field and command the world to march to the appointed Goal or end, chosen by their own vision and will. Only a person of integrity has this power over life and it's happenings. Naturally,  then, integrity is the essential core of all eminently successful life.

Source:
Book - We Must

Swami Chinmayanandaji's thought for the day:
The most perfect characteristic in an eminently successful life seems to be integrity - an inflexible, undaunted, firm integrity. And,  also, it seems that everyone who has cultivated this trait has drawn from it many an unseen and personal advantage over others who are striving in the same field of achievement.
The nobility of integrity is not merely in its honour, sincerity, our honesty in action, but it is rooted deeper in its quality and beauty of one's intentions. If the spring of our every thought is pure and if we have the heroism to live unfailingly ever true to the great ideals in ourselves, however impractical and utopian they may be, even inspite of all immediate failures, we still have cultivated integrity.
The personality in us, thereafter, with glowing poise unfolds, and at each apparent failure, with each insurmountable obstacle met, in each moment of social criticism faced, and from all empty laughter of pithless ridicule endured, we come to steel our nobility and reinforce our determination to live the honourable life consistent with our ideals and our goals.
Such individuals alone are evolvers, all others are mere adapters - at every turn compromising with circumstances adjusting to the changing patterns of challenges. They may struggle on, as hapless slaves to their habits, but never can they come to dominate the outer field and command the world to march to the appointed Goal or end, chosen by their own vision and will. Only a person of integrity has this power over life and it's happenings. Naturally,  then, integrity is the essential core of all eminently successful life.

Source:
Book - We Must

We stand as one family
bound to each other
with love and respect

We serve as an army
courageous and disciplined
ever ready to fight against
all low tendencies and false values,
within and without us.

We live honestly
the noble life of sacrifice and service
producing more than what we consume
and giving more than what we take.

We seek the Lord's grace
to keep us on the path
of virtue, courage and wisdom.

May Thy grace and blessings
flow through us
to the world around us.

We believe that the
service of our country
is the service of the Lord of lords
and devotion to the people
Is the devotion to the Supreme Self.

We know our responsibilities
Give us the ability and courage to fulfil them.

Om Tat Sat

Chinmaya Mission Pledge
by Swami Chinmayananda