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SRF Walrus > SRF Teachings and Ideals > Are the teachings bad?
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etzchaim Registered User (10/31/03 12:30 pm) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll Dawnrays, I wish you healing from the surgery - sorry to hear you are having some complications. Onetaste, I have to chime in with Chrisparis. Did xmonk trigger something in you? Yuck. You sound just like your criticisms of him. Where is that coming from? Maybe you need a colonic????
ugizralrite Registered User (10/31/03 4:18 pm) Reply	Re: William the Conquerer Sorry link didn't work. Here is what was on that link: “In later years Yogananda revealed to me why he called me his ‘giant returned.’ Yogananda in a past existence had been William the Conquerer. “I experienced in a vision the Battle of Hastings as King Wlliam conquered England. I was beside him in this battle, and was of such stature I could look him straight in the eyes while standing beside him as he sat astride his horse. I carried a gigantic battle axe which in effect allowed no harm to come to his person.” – Norman Paulsen, in “The Christ Consciousness”, p. 108. *** “Once I asked Master a question with regard to William the Conqueror. (Master said he was William the Conqueror in a previous lifetime.) I asked, ‘Is it possible for someone who is liberated not to realize it? Can an avatar not realize he has attained that stature?’ Master said, ‘You never lose your sense of inner freedom.’ A very wise answer! – Sw. Kriyananda, in “Avatar,” a talk at Sunday Service at Ananda Cooperative Village on February 1, 1998 * “Master had told Daya that she was one of his daughters when he was William the Conqueror. One couldn't help feeling that there was a certain regal quality about Daya Mata, as also about Virginia, her sister, who now bears the name Ananda Mata, and who also was closely related to Master during that lifetime. I came to believe, though Master had never told me so, that I was Daya's youngest brother, Master's son, in that incarnation. Many other disciples had asked Master if they were with him then, and what role they had played. He was pleased to answer them. But even during the time when many monks were asking him this question, it never occurred to me to do so, though I felt I must have been close to him, and had always felt an affinity with that period of English history. In retrospect I wonder whether he didn't prevent the question from arising in my mind. At any rate, once the thought of having been his youngest son entered my mind, I went to the Los Angeles public library and did a little research. That library contains a vast amount of information that is of insufficient general interest to appear in books sold in the retail market. I discovered there many facts that went far towards supporting my theory, characteristics and episodes that were subtly reminiscent of similar ones in my present life.” – Sw. Kriyananda, in “A Place Called Ananda”, chapter 4. * “Your question, ‘Why should a fully liberated soul like our Master play such worldly roles?’ raises a question that many people must have asked. I know he himself said he was a general in Spain during the Spanish efforts to drive the Muslims out of Spain. And he also said that he was William the Conqueror: a real shocker for me when I first heard it, as I'd been raised under the English schooling system and had always thought of William as one of history’s leading villains. And now I discovered he was my own guru! So how do we figure that one?! “Napoleon, I believe it was, said, ‘History is a lie agreed upon.’ William was, from the reading I have done since then, a great and also a very spiritual man who, I understand, never missed a day’s mass in his life, and whose only close friends were saints. Still, that doesn’t explain his being a warrior, conquerer, and king. Why? The fact seems to be that avatars do enter into the unfolding drama of history. There may be another explanation, too: They may play these roles for the sake of their disciples, to help them in their evolution and also to prepare them for roles they’ll be called on to assume in future lives, in serving God. These are my own answers to a perplexing question. They satisfy me, because I don’t really think it’s important to understand everything! By the way, Sri Yukteswar, during Master’s life as William, was the Italian priest Lanfranc, his spiritual mentor. Lanfranc wrote what some historian called ‘one of those obscure medieval treatises’ which described three universes: causal, astral, and material!... “Dhirananda was Duke Robert, the son of William, during that incarnation. He burned with jealousy then, and his jealousy continued to burn strongly in the present life. He was the one mentioned Autobiography of a Yogi, when Sri Yukteswar scolded Master to Master's father for trying to convert a certain person to this path against Sri Yukteswar's mild admonishment not to do so. Master himself knew what the outcome would be, as Sri Yukteswar did. Sri Yukteswar was trying to spare him that future suffering. Master didn't see that he had a choice in this case, out of his loyalty to the man in question. The man was Master's disciple from other lives. And though he told a boyhood friend of his, Tulsi Bose, when they were both teenagers that Dhirananda would ‘betray’ him someday, Master chose to accept this suffering in the hope of helping one of whom he once said, ‘No matter what he does, he will never find God except through this instrument.’ The ways of Masters are strange and infinitely complex!” – Sw. Kriyananda, in a personal letter. * “It's interesting to note that England went to India and brought the knowledge of the West there, because India needed to balance its inward life with the outward efficiency of the West. Another interesting sidelight on history is that England is the oldest continuous government in the world, the second being our own country. England's government dates back to the conquest of William the Conqueror, who brought England to a level of security, stability, and legal organization that made it possible for it to survive the death of medieval society and continue on into the modern age. “Part of what William did was to change the typical medieval practice of having the serfs and lesser nobles pledge their loyalty first to their own local baron rather than to the king. Prior to William's reign, if a baron rose in rebellion against the king, all his serfs and nobles had to follow him. William introduced the system of pledging loyalty first to the king, and with that method he united the whole kingdom. This enabled England to endure when other countries fell apart into warring duchies.” – Sw. Kriyananda, in “The Light of Superconsciousness,” p. 195-6. * “I recall many of my past incarnations.... Quite a few people have heard me mention a previous life in which I lived for many years in England. Experiences of that life come clearly to my mind. There were certain details about the Tower of London that I remembered very well, and when I went there in 1935 I saw that those places were exactly as I had seen them within. From childhood I knew that in one incarnation I had lived by the ocean. As a little boy I used to see in my mind’s eye many places and events of that incarnation.... From childhood I was interested in creating buildings.... This interest was prominent because I had done much building during my incarnation in England. So many experiences I recall from other lives!” – Paramahansa Yogananda, in “The Divine Romance,” pages 152-3. * “Never was I born, though in my dreams of earth life I was born many times.... In this one incarnation I can sleep and dream that I am in England as a powerful king. Then I die and dream I am born a devout man. And then I die again and am born as a successful lawyer. Again I die and am reborn as Yogananda. But they are all dreams.... I used to find such pleasure in discovering my past incarnations. But that has lost its enchantment. They are just so many dreams.” – Paramahansa Yogananda, idem, page 167. * “Any time I found something hounding me from the past, I have cut it out. as a child I had a very fierce disposition. And then one day I resolved that I was not going to carry this anger with me anymore. I said, ‘Get out!’ and from that day forth, I never felt anger again. I don’t tell people I am not angry; I let them think I am, because sometimes a little fire is necessary. But inwardly I couldn’t be angry if I tried.” – Paramahansa Yogananda, idem, page 273. * “I remember another life centuries ago, when someone I loved very much [Duke Robert, the son of William?] was inimical to me and hurt me; but I triumphed over him. I met him again in this life, and again he became treacherous [Swami Dhirananda?] But I have tried only to help him. He shall pursue me no more.... I also recall my own past incarnations, beyond all doubt. In the Tower of London, for example, I found many places that I remember from a past life, places the present caretakers didn’t know anything about.” – Paramahansa Yogananda, idem, page 277. *** “A short, broad-shouldered northern Frenchman, approaching his fortieth year, a man with long arms, powerfully built, and famous for the strength of his hands, clean-shaven, square-jawed, obese, vigorous–all that–decided, at about five o’clock of an autumn evening on a Sussex hill, the destinies of England and, in great part, of the world. “It was on the mile-long ridge where now the village and ruins of Battle stand, some half a dozen miles north of the sea of Hastings, that this man won the great fight. It was his inteligence, his will, his tenacity, which had done all.... “This man was William, William the @#%$, Duke of Normandy, thenceforward to be King of England and the principal figure in the western world.... “[Aready the year 1048] The singularity of William’s character was already marked. His long fits of silence, especially after his passions of anger; his brooding, his lonely planning, combined with the vigor of his wrath. He was singular in nothing more than this, that, being such a man, he was even thus, in the strength of his youth, chaste; it was part of the strength of his will. And there went also with the strength of will a comprehension of religion which was at once personal and political. He was exact in observance, large in endowment, and he perceived how the further organization of that which had been, since the end of the old pagan civilization, the one constructive force in Europe–the Church– should be part of the structure of his State.... “All this business from Hastings onwards is essentially the re-entry of Britain more fully and finally into the European unity of which of course it had always formed a part; and this showed itself in the eccesiastical structure of the island, in the economic and political organization of it, in the unity which it founded based on one class of similar habits and speech–to be predominant in a hundred years from the Grampians to the Levant. “It was the Church which had been the principal support of William from the beginning. That universal society with its chief at Rome could not deny the moral system for which it stood and the general acceptance throughout Christendom of William’s claim. And William, both by his support and by his reformation and strengthening of the clerical organization, became still more firmly its ally. “Thus, a very necessary piece of reform, part and parcel of the time, recently undertaken in Normandy itself, was here introduced: the separation of the ecclesiastical from the civil courts. It would have come anyhow, for it was spreading all over Europe, but it was specifically William’s work.... “We must here repeat that fundamental truth upon the England of 1074–that there had been no conquest in the modern sense. William was not called a ‘Conqueror’ in the later meaning of the Conquistadores, for instance, who occupied and took over heathen land in America. A conqueror then meant one who had been blessed in his ordeal by battle, who had made good by force his rightful clain, and that was the only conception that the word conveyed to William’s mind, or indeed to the mass of his contemporaries. Nor was there ‘the giving of alien laws.’ All society was governed everywhere by its customs, each manor living a nearly self-sufficient life, having all its domestic arrangements based on custom, which was sacred. The lord could demand no more than the customary work; the customary tenures, boundaries, privileges, rites and dues were immutable. But what the new administration and the new dinasty could do, and did, was to make precise what had before been vague, to put upon record what had hitherto been traditional, to organize, and to vivify.” – Hilaire Belloc, in “William the Conqueror,” Tan Books and Publishers, Inc. Edited by: ugizralrite at: 10/31/03 4:28 pm
OneTaste Registered User (10/31/03 5:15 pm) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll *Quote:* Onetaste, I have to chime in with Chrisparis. Did xmonk trigger something in you? Apparently he did. (You should have seen it before I edited it.) I guess he pushed me over the edge with that “Good luck” and the drugs and alcohol thing at the end. *Quote:* Yuck. You sound just like your criticisms of him. Hmm. You think so? I don’t see that. I see me being a raving cantankeroid, sure, but I don’t see the “oh, you poor lost soul, one day you will be as advanced as I” tone that he’s trading in. I could be wrong though. *Quote:* Where is that coming from? Call it a delayed reaction to a long simmering distaste for a few ex-monastics who come on here and insinuate that anyone who sees anything positive about SRF is somehow deluded because it’s a flat out cult yadda, yadda. I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all, but I guess I just boiled over with this further leap into the emperor having no clothes stuff. *Quote:* Maybe you need a colonic???? LOL. Nah, I may be full of (sh)it, but I don’t think that’s gonna help. I must say I never seem to learn that vitriol is only ok here if it is aimed at the “bad ladies.” Should have stayed in hibernation.
dawnrays Registered User (10/31/03 5:46 pm) Reply	One Taste One Taste, I thought you were very chilvarous actually (worthy of a knight!) Thank you Rachel Corrie and etzchaim for your well wishes and also ugizralrite for the fascinating history lesson. You certainly have clarified alot of things about Master and William. dawnrays
chela2020 Registered User (11/1/03 8:49 am) Reply	Re: Agreed Soul Circle (This message was left blank) Edited by: chela2020 at: 12/4/03 8:44 pm
stermejo Registered User (11/1/03 9:34 am) Reply	One T bone Gee whiz T, except for the non-dual ones?? Ya mean, like Islam? It sure looked that way to me; in Islam no one comes between you and God. Gosh, what happened when when I got inside the mosque? Let's see, you got the shariat, the hadith, the Koran, plenty of mullahs, etc, etc, ad nauseaum. Nahhh, give me the simple life. Edited by: stermejo at: 11/1/03 9:45 am
stermejo Registered User (11/1/03 9:37 am) Reply	Re: cognitive dissonance Boy, you kids have been busy this week! I have, too. It must be in the stars but, whoa etz! I couldn’t really follow your comparison of CD to (shudder) karma. So, not as the low caste tradesmen that I, and a certain Jewish carpenter, both are (eewww, that nasty caste system!), I looked it up and see the relationship to this discussion but not karma. I wish I could have used a more current version but these snippets come from the book Social Psychology (‘93) by David G. Myers. Read it and ask yourself, SRF in a nut (pun intended:-) shell? …the effect of actions on attitudes. Why does action affect attitude? “Cognitive dissonance theory assumes that to reduce discomfort, we justify our actions to ourselves.” “Cognitive dissonance: Tension that arises when one is simultaneously aware of two inconsistent cognitions. For example, dissonance may occur when we realize that we have, with little justification, acted contrary to our attitudes or made a decision favoring one alternative despite reasons for favoring another.” “The theory is simple… . It assumes we feel tension (“dissonance”) when two thoughts or beliefs (“cognitions”) are psychologically inconsistent-when we recognize that they don’t fit together. Festinger argued that we adjust our thinking to reduce this tension.” “Dissonance theory pertains mostly to discrepancies between behavior and attitudes. We are aware of both. Thus if we sense an inconsistency, we feel pressure for change.” “So if we can persuade others to adopt a new attitude, their behavior should change accordingly; that’s common sense. Or if we can induce a person to behave differently, their attitude should change… .” “Cognitive dissonance produces the insufficient justification effect: reduction of dissonance by internally justifying one’s behavior when external justification is ‘insufficient.’” “…decisions produce dissonance. When faced with an important decision-what college to attend, whom to date, which job to accept-we are sometimes torn between two equally attractive alternatives.” After making important decisions, we usually reduce dissonance by upgrading the chosen alternative and denigrating the option we passed over. Deciding-becomes-believing. Once made, decisions grow their own legs of support. Stermejo: Interestingly enough Leon Festinger who proposed the theory got his inspiration from…cue theme from Twilight Zone …INDIA! Festinger said, “Following a 1934 earthquake (in India), there were rumors outside the disaster zone of worse disasters to follow. It occurred to me that these rumors might be-“anxiety justifying”-cognitions that would justify their lingering fears. From that germ of an idea, my theory of dissonance reduction-making your view of the world fit with how you feel or what you’ve done-developed.”
dawnrays Registered User (11/1/03 9:42 am) Reply	Chela2020 Chela2020, I don't think you can ever really let go of somebody you have felt deeply for. You will always carry a part of them to your next destination (and now it is a part of you!) You will be a fuller, happier and more complex person because of your experience with srf and Master. It isn't necessary in my opinion, to analyze it to death. Of course this goes for any relationship ending, death and even our own deaths and reincarnations. I have said before that I hope you are happy in your new spiritual home and it sounds like more of what you need and desire. I think you have trusted your own intuition to make this choice and now have gotten to the point where you don't need outside verification anymore. I went through a similar experience when I found I couldn't perform my sadhanas in the prescribed srf manner and sort of went off on my own schedule. I have no doubt that Master is also very happy for you. Love, dawnrays Edited by: dawnrays at: 11/1/03 9:48 am
dawnrays Registered User (11/1/03 10:06 am) Reply	Caste System Stermejo, I was referring to a person's mental/emotional/spiritual outlook as opposed to what they actually do for a living when I was referring to the caste system. You could even be qualified for more than one, I guess. Jesus of course was a Brahman, even though he was a carpenter. Sorry to go on and on, but once you've started on a topic, you feel like you need to clarify yourself sometimes. dawnrays
chela2020 Registered User (11/1/03 11:30 am) Reply	Re: Chela2020 (This message was left blank) Edited by: chela2020 at: 12/4/03 8:57 pm
stermejo Registered User (11/1/03 3:11 pm) Reply	Re: William the Conquerer and cognitive dissonance First Dawn, I was only teasing. Words like Karma, caste, spiritual, etc., etc., bring out a little devilishness in me. Ugize wrote: Big Boy, N Paulsen says, “I was beside him in this battle, and was of such stature I could look him straight in the eyes while standing beside him as he sat astride his horse.” A man so tall that standing he can look another man, atop a horse, straight in the eye! How is it possible? Let’s make the world fit our perceptions: Adjust the size of the rider. I couldn’t find any physical characteristics of Wm on the web. So say, average at 5’ 11” he will be about 2’-11” from saddle to eyeball. We’ll have to adjust the size of the horse to less than average. An average Percheron from Normandy would be 17 hands (4 inches per hand) or 5’8” from the ground to shoulders. 14 hands at 4' 6'' otherwise, the observer will have to be nearly a foot taller than Yao Ming who’s 7’-6” Horse is now a bit too small for a conqueror. But it's our world now. Adjust the size of the observer. He IS 8'7"! The observer IS one giant of a man. But wait! Why not the observer is simply…the horse, carrying a weapon…his rider into battle? Either that or Wm the C was a dwarf riding a pygmy pony. Which perception is the most comforting? Feel the dissonance? Choose any one now and the world, seeing it's in the past, can fit your perceptions, eventually;-)
etzchaim Registered User (11/2/03 8:43 am) Reply	Re: William the Conquerer and cognitive dissonance Stermejo, right on. ------------------------------------------------------------- Perception, when filtering through a system that rejects what it is uncomfortable with, will shape the 'vision' to fit the idealized preconceived decision. I love how the tension seems to lessen here when people jump to the battle cry! "Yogananda had no blemishes!!!!" Dawnrays, you say "thanks for clarifying" whenever someone writes something that verifies what you want to believe. The last time I recall you saying that was with Swami Prems Guru. You thanked him for 'clarifying'. ("Perception, when filtering..." and from Stermejo's quotes: "After making important decisions, we usually reduce dissonance by upgrading the chosen alternative and denigrating the option we passed over. Deciding-becomes-believing. Once made, decisions grow their own legs of support".) I have no doubt that he was great and holy, it's the pride and temper he displayed that make him come alive for me. I'm just wondering why the idealism and the shock and discomfort that comes from hearing that he may have made mistakes. I must just like my heroes with an edge on them. I like them human. Some people like their heros larger than life itself. Thats all I can think of to have this make sense. Usually, when I have past life memories, I'm looking through my own eyes. Two of the very few times I was looking AT myself, was once, I was a young man playing a flute in India, in a field of grass or grain of some kind. I wanted to not go somewhere and I had cold feet, like my fear manifested in a literal sense. The other time, I was in a desert in the Middle East. A woman was giving birth in a tent and I was watching myself cast a circle and start to do some sort of magic when women came out of the tent wailing and I knew I was too late. Yogananda saw himself as more of a participant, that he was protecting William. Maybe I need to participate more in my past...I could have saved that womans life... I was reading a part of the Zohar last night and this morning. It describes how everyone of us has a soul attached to our physical bodies and another soul way up in the causal plane that remains conscious and affects the soul attached to the body. That sounds to me like Yogananda's 'giant'. He got a glimpse of his. I guess it's our higher selves. My giant needs to carry a bigger ax, it seems... The language of vision and the higher planes may be very different from the world we can experience in the 'physical' sense. Williams physical characteristics: William was tall and had weight problems. People tended to make fun of him because he was fat. There's definately a resemblance between him and Yogananda, especially in the way they carried themselves (barrel chests out) and in the eyes. He WAS indeed very protected when he went into battle. It was a celebration of yet another successful fight that killed him. I wonder why William won his ax battles and Yogananda lost his court battles???? Edited by: etzchaim at: 11/2/03 10:03 am
etzchaim Registered User (11/2/03 9:53 am) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll One Taste, you responded: ------------------------------------------------------------- "Quote: Yuck. You sound just like your criticisms of him. Hmm. You think so? I don’t see that. I see me being a raving cantankeroid, sure, but I don’t see the “oh, you poor lost soul, one day you will be as advanced as I” tone that he’s trading in. I could be wrong though. ------------------------------------------------------------- I think you two are just being cantankerous in equal and opposite directions and you sounded a little self-righteous in my perception. You're both making valid points from your own perspectives. It wasn't so much what you said, you chivalrous Knight, you!, it was how you said it that wasn't 'chivalrous'. That makes you just a Knight, I guess ["...ain't it just like the night to play...tricks while your trying to be so quiet...???"]. I guess I look at the fact that xmonk has spent more time in the Mother Ship than either you or Dawnrays, and may, in fact be more damaged by it. You kinda had that salt rubbed in the wounds sort of feeling in your remarks which reminds of the culture in the Mother Ship. Does that make sense? I've been alternating between reading the Zohar and playing Memphis Blues riffs on my guitar all morning. It's made me feel kinda strange... ------------------------------------------------------------- Quote: Where is that coming from? Call it a delayed reaction to a long simmering distaste for a few ex-monastics who come on here and insinuate that anyone who sees anything positive about SRF is somehow deluded because it’s a flat out cult yadda, yadda. I probably shouldn’t have said anything at all, but I guess I just boiled over with this further leap into the emperor having no clothes stuff. ------------------------------------------------------------- Well now, that was a good answer. I think it's somewhere in the middle, myself. I'm having difficulty with the idealizers and you're having difficulty with the cynics! Edited by: etzchaim at: 11/2/03 10:00 am
OneTaste Registered User (11/2/03 11:18 pm) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll *Quote:* That makes you just a Knight, I guess ["...ain't it just like the night to play...tricks while your trying to be so quiet...???"]. Just like the knight, Etz? Well, I’m sitting here doin’ my best to deny it. But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues--you can tell by the way she smiles
etzchaim Registered User (11/3/03 9:48 am) Reply	Re: William the Conquerer and cognitive dissonance Ach, it was Norman Paulsen who was the Giant! That'll teach me to not skim posts... Please refer to Stermejo's post regarding such creatures and those with large statures. William was a big man, and I'm sure as the King, he rode a large war horse. Those beasts are HUGE. Paulsen must have been on another horse, no doubt about it, or this is definately a symbolic vision, much like a dream - especially with his ax having magical qualities that protects his Lord and Liege from all harm . Symbols. Oh well, I'll give up on participating in my past before I've even started. It was a great idea, who knows what I could have changed! That woman might have lived!
etzchaim Registered User (11/3/03 9:51 am) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll "Well, I’m sitting here doin’ my best to deny it. But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues--you can tell by the way she smiles" Just watch out for that little boy lost, Taste, he takes himself so seriously.
ranger20 Registered User (11/3/03 10:48 am) Reply	Re: William the Conquerer *Quote:* A short, broad-shouldered northern Frenchman, approaching his fortieth year...–all that–decided, at about five o’clock of an autumn evening on a Sussex hill, the destinies of England and, in great part, of the world. “It was on the mile-long ridge where now the village and ruins of Battle stand, some half a dozen miles north of the sea of Hastings, that this man won the great fight. It was his inteligence, his will, his tenacity, which had done all.... Interesting turn this thread took during a few days when I was offline. But I do remember an item in the New York Times around Y2K, titled "The shot of the millenium," indicating that the critical moment at Hastings was not a matter of "intelligence, will, tenacity," but the result of what one calls in football, a "Hail Mary." The Normans had inferior position, and armour, and were almost out of arrows. They had fought all day without gaining any ground. They loosed a final flight of arrows, and one struck King Harold in the eye. At the loss of their leader, the Saxon ranks broke. The article went on to note that if not for that arrow, we in the US might have come from a culture in which there was a word for "work" but none for "pleasure," a word for "sex" but none for "romance." Some "lowly" archer had the hand of Destiny on his shoulder for a moment, and almost certainly never knew it.
OneTaste Registered User (11/3/03 1:06 pm) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll *Quote:* Just watch out for that little boy lost, Taste, he takes himself so seriously. Lol. Etz, I was gonna go to that very spot in response to the "damaged" you cited, but decided not to, since it would just be a lot of gall, so useless and all. How can I explain? Sometimes it’s so hard to get on, eh? Well, gotta go. These visions, they kept me up past dawn. So outta the cryptic and into the crypt.
etzchaim Registered User (11/3/03 2:16 pm) Reply	Re: William the Conquerer Ranger, in the books I'm going through, it seems to be a mixture of wisdom, instilling of fear and dumb luck. From "William the Conqueror" by David Walker: "...Twenty-six unfortunate citizens were lined up and their hands and feet were cut off, partly for vengeance, partly to terrify the garrison. The savagery was successful. William was rarely driven to that point of anger again...." and we all breathed a sigh of relief! I imagine he became moody after than and repented and this type of savagery was rare, but you get the idea. Here's another quote: "One more characteristic was to emerge prominately as William grew older, expecially after he had become King of England, his greed for gold: 'Into avarice did he fall And loved greediness above all'. "So wrote an English monk who 'had looked upon him, and once lived at his court....He was a very stern and violent man, so that no one dared do anything contrary to his will. He had earls in his fetters, who acted against his will. He expelled bishops from their sees, and abbots from their abbacies, and put thegns in prison, and finally he did not spare his own brother, who was called Odo'." The book does go into his other, better, more developed and wise characteristics, but there's no doubt, as I go through biography after biography, there were some definate issues, particularly with pride, violence and avarice. He appears to have felt badly about his weakness, though, that does attest to the workings of his soul and probably lead him to his religious proclivities, though he appears to have been still having some difficulties even in his later life.
etzchaim Registered User (11/4/03 5:37 am) Reply	Re: There's some cognitive dissonance for ya'll OneTaste, I was thinking of a whole host of boys and girls when I wrote that one. It could probably be applied to all of us at some point in our lives. Compassion for the people that bug us the most is a hard lesson

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