Table of Contents
Preface xi
Water
Subtle Realm
Unconsciousness
Mind
Dreams
Strategy
Logic
Possibilities
Passivity
Mobility
Introduction 3
The Ugly Duckling Hans Christian Andersen 5
'The Prologue' from Tales from the Thousand and One Nights 15
from The Prince Niccolò Machiavelli 23
from Through the Looking-Glass-'Looking-glass House' Lewis Carroll 43
from The Art of War - 'Forms and Dispositions' Sun-tzu 53
Earth
Winter
Body
Decay
Womb
Mother
Receptive
Passive
Stagnation (Prison)
Roots
Introduction 61
Oscar Wilde: from De Profundis 63
from Dracula -'Dr Seward's Diary' Bram Stoker 76
from Eichmann and the Holocaust Hannah Arendt 81
from Selected Poems - 'He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' and 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' W. B. Yeats 90
from Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence 92
Air
Breath
Life
Communication
Action
Instability
Agitation (not action)
Introduction 107
from No Easy Walk to Freedom - 'Black Man in a White Man's Court' Nelson Mandela 109
from One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 117
from The Strange Case of Full Statement of the Case' Robert Louis Stevenson Dr Jekyll Mr Hyde 'Henry Jekyll's 125
from Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell 132
from Fictions - 'The Library of Babel' Jorge Luis Borges 141
Fire
Spirit
Light
Heat
Darkness (Smoke) Hymn
Hell
Motion: Root of all change
Introduction 153
From the Rig Veda - 'Hymns to Agni, God of the Sacrifice' 156
From The Desert Fathers - Sayings of the Early Christian Monks - 'Visions' 167
From the Bhagavad Gita 181
From the Dead Sea Scrolls 192
from Venus in Furs Leopold Sacher-Masoch 194
from The Prophet Kahlil Gibran 199
from Spiritual Verses Rumi 202
from Selected Poems - 'Brahma, Visnu, Siva' Rabindranath Tagore 223
from Frankenstein Mary Shelly 227
Acknowledgements 237
