A Wisdom Archive on Ultimate

Founded in 1821, Amherst was intended to be a successor to both Williams College, which was then struggling to remain open, and Amherst Academy, a secondary school which educated, among others, Emily Dickinson. Amherst College - Origin of name. Amherst Academy and Amherst College were both named for the town of Amherst, which in turn was named for Lord Jeffery Amherst, commanding general of British forces in North America during the French and Indian War. Lord Jeffery Amherst is now notorious for his comments, in a letter to a peer, about spreading smallpo ...

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Admission to Amherst College is among the most competitive in the country. Notable faculty members include modern literature and poetry critic William H. Pritchard, Beowulf translator Howell Chickering, Jewish and Latino studies scholar Ilan Stavans, and law and society expert Austin Sarat. Amherst is a member of the Five Colleges consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other Pioneer Valley institutions, including Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts. The Five Colleges are geographically close to one another and are li ...

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Ultima Thule (Latin) Farthest Thule, Thule being the Greek and Roman name of an alleged island somewhere north of Britain and considered as the northern limit of the habitable globe; figuratively, any ultimate goal.

 
(See also: Ultima Thule, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

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Unmanifest or Unmanifested Usually used of the First Logos in contradistinction to the manifest-unmanifest or Second Logos; though this unmanifested Logos is correctly said to be the first manifestation of the Absolute or the summit or primordial originant of a cosmic hierarchy, of which there are innumerable multitudes in boundless space. The unmanifest corresponds to primordial unity where the totality of the manifested universe is "all numbers." Behind the ultimate which can be conceived, we have to postulate an unknown indefinable antecedent, which may therefore be called unmanifest.
 
Used in limited senses in reference to planes of manifestation: thus the unmanifested causes of things on the physical plane may be manifest to the consciousness pertaining to the higher planes.
 
See also MANIFESTATION

 
(See also: Unmanifest, Unmanifested, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

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The ultimate solution to all problems - ecological, social and personal - lies within you. However, when you embark on that spiritual journey to go within, you will find that the solution is not sitting there, waiting to be discovered.
 
It is hidden away, made almost inaccessible, under the many-layered maya or illusion, that keeps you mired in ignorance. The spirit, obscured by this many-layered veil, is unable to reflect and know the nature of its true self.
 
 

 
(See also: Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » Peace on Earth: Getting In Touch With Yourself

Once upon a time, a musk deer went searching for musk. Round and round the forest she went, month after month, quite unaware that the heady fragrance, so desperately sought by her, lay beneath her own belly button. Many times, we humans, too, behave like the musk deer. We search for self-realisation outside, blissfully unaware that it lies within us, all the while untapped.
 
To experience this bliss, however, the seeker has to put in a different sort of effort with regularity and devotion. One way lies through the world of forms, through the path of bhakti, where the seeker concentrates on any of the manifest forms of the Ultimate.

 
(See also: Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul )

Read more here: » Peace of Mind: The Ideal Way to Get Close to God - Bhakti

Neo-platonism. Lit.,"The new Platonism" or Platonic School. An eclectic pantheistic school of philosophy founded in Alexandria by Ammonius Saccas, of which his disciple Plotinus was the head (A.D. 189-270). It sought to reconcile Platonic teachings and the Aristotelean system with oriental Theosophy. Its chief occupation was pure spiritual philosophy, metaphysics and mysticism. Theurgy was introduced towards its later years. It was the ultimate effort of high intelligences to check the ever-increasing ignorant superstition and blind faith of the times; the last product of Greek philosophy, which was finally crushed and put to death by brute force.

 
(See also: Neo-platonism, Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary,  )

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Read more here: » Gaia: Encyclopedia - Gaia

Upadhi (Sanskrit) Limitation, peculiarity, disguise, vehicle; in theosophy, " ''that which stands forth following a model or pattern,'' as a canvas, so to say, upon which the light from a projecting lantern plays. An ''upadhi'' therefore, mystically speaking, is like a play of shadow and form, when compared with the ultimate Reality, which is the cause of this play of shadow and form. Man may be considered as being composed of three (or even four) essential upadhis or bases" (OG 178).
 
According to the classification of the Taraka-Raja-Yoga philosophy, man is divided into three upadhis which are synthesized by, and are the vehicle of, the highest principle or atman. These three upadhis are: karanopadhi, the upadhi of the causal or spiritual mind; sukshmopadhi, the upadhi of the higher and lower manas plus the astral vehicle and the life-essence combined with kama; and the sthulopadhi, the physical body, which thus is the general vehicle or upadhi of the six principles composing the human constitution.
 
Mulaprakriti (primordial physical matter) in Hindu philosophy is the upadhi or vehicle of every phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. "Matter is Eternal. It is the Upadhi (the physical basis) for the One infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations" (SD 1:280). An upadhi, then, is the vehicle, carrier, or means by which a higher or superior energy of whatever plane is enabled to manifest its characteristics and qualities on the lower plane, out of the substance of which lower plane the upadhi is built.
 
Sometimes upadhi is interchangeable with vahana (vehicle); thus manas is spoken of as the upadhi or vahana of buddhi. But the more frequent use of upadhi is as a foundation or base. For instance, Blavatsky speaks of hydrogen as the upadhi of both air and water; and of akasa as the upadhi of divine thought. "Cosmic Ideation focussed in a principle or upadhi (basis) results as the consciousness of the individual Ego. Its manifestation varies with the degree of upadhi, e.g., through that known as Manas it wells up as Mind-Consciousness; through the more finely differentiated fabric (sixth state of matter) of the Buddhi resting on the experience of Manas as its basis -- as a stream of spiritual intuition" (SD 1:329n).

 
(See also: Upadhi, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

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Unity Kosmic unity, incomprehensible to humans, implies wholeness, homogeneity, uniformity, indivisibility -- individuality. Its primary expression is kosmic space. Unity can be applied to any individual, such as the First Logos or any subordinate logos; again, any individual monadic unit is de facto a unity. Unity, in contrast with duality or multiplicity, is relative, as when we speak of a whole in relation to its parts, the unitary essence of a compound body, or the hyparxis of a hierarchy. The tendency of evolution on an upward arc is towards unity; on a downward arc, towards diversity; and both tendencies are active in the human being.
 
With Pythagoras, one is not a number but the root of all numbers flowing out of it, but in modern views it is the first number. It may be called mystically dual, for as a power of 2 it must be even, while as 1 less than 2 it must be odd. Unity may be viewed as simple or as all-inclusive; it appears as the goal of both analysis and synthesis.
 
In considering how the One becomes the many, how the homogeneous becomes heterogeneous, during the differentiations during manvantara, we are posing the ultimate problem. The unity during manvantaric kosmic differentiation does not lose its unity in the vast diversities of such differentiation, for the unity forever remains the originant and expresses itself at the same time as its integral unity and as the emanated hierarchies which temporarily flow forth from it, in time to return into it again.

 
(See also: Unity, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » ultimate dictionary

Unknowable In the procedures of human thought there always arrives a philosophical point beyond which the mind seems unable to penetrate, and this point is for that particular line of thought unknowable.
 
Therefore, there must be as many unknowables as there are beyonds in the processes of human thinking, and hence it becomes highly inadvisable to reduce the term unknowable to one specific meaning. It has been applied to the one ultimate cause of our universe, the rootless root of all within that specific universe, since this unknowable confessedly cannot be an object of cognition by mind.
 
However, it has been used by modern agnostics, in particular Herbert Spencer, to denote things which are not unknowable, but merely the noumenal which underlies the phenomenal, which limits the knowable world only to that which we can comprehend with our present physical faculties and the mental notions based on them. It is therefore but a convenient way of shelving all inquiries which seem to stand in the way of the formulation of a materialistic philosophy.

 
(See also: Unknowable, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » ultimate dictionary