The one thing we can all guarantee is that our lives will end at some point. It actually helps to embrace that fact. I have found that time is more valuable when you can see your mortality on the horizon.
Tom Rath, It’s Not About You: A Brief Guide to a Meaningful Life [Amazon]
Concerning Death by Aleister Crowley in International, Dec 1917.
“Then follow in thy mind the wondrous word of the Stélé of Revealing itself. Return if thou wilt from the abode of the stars; dwell with mortality, and feast thereon. For thou art this day made Lord of Heaven and of Earth.” [via]
The Deeper Symbolism of Freemasonry from The Meaning of Masonry by Walter Leslie Wilmshurst.
“The Mason who knows his science knows that the death of the body is only a natural transition of which he need have no dread whatever; he knows also that when the due time for it arrives, that transition will be a welcome respite from the bondage of this world, from his prison-like husk of mortality, and from the daily burdens incident to existence in this lower plane of life.” [via]
The Deeper Symbolism of Freemasonry from The Meaning of Masonry by Walter Leslie Wilmshurst.
“This, our body of mortality, this veil of flesh and blood clothing the inner soul of us, this is the real ‘badge of innocence,’ the common ‘bond of friendship,’ with which the Great Architect has been pleased to invest us all this, the human body, is the badge which is ‘older and nobler than that of any other Order in existence'” [via]
The Nameless Quest in The Gate of the Sanctuary from The Temple of the Holy Ghost (Collected Works, Vol I) by Aleister Crowley.
“The quest is mine! Here ends mortality
In contemplating the eternal Thee.” [via]
The Nameless Quest in The Gate of the Sanctuary from The Temple of the Holy Ghost (Collected Works, Vol I) by Aleister Crowley.
“Mine eyes had fixed them on the sphinx, the sky.
‘Is then this quest of immortality?’
And echo answered from some unseen caves:
Mortality! I shrink, and wonder why.
Strange I am nothing tainted with this fear
Now, that had touched me first. For I am here
Half-way I reckon to the field of salt,
The pillar, and the bones—it was a fault
I am cured of! praise to God!” [via]
William Blake and the Imagination in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.
“The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts.” [via]