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We seek what one might call a relative omnipotence: the power to have everything we want, to enjoy everything we desire, to demand that all our wishes be satisfied and that our will should never be frustrated or opposed. It is the need to have everyone else bow to our judgment and accept our declarations as law. It is the insatiable thirst for recognition of the excellence which we so desperately need to find in ourselves to avoid despair. This claim to omnipotence, our deepest secret and our inmost shame, is in fact the source of all our sorrows, all our unhappiness, all our dissatisfactions, all our mistakes and deceptions.
If you persist in trying
To attain what is never attained
If you persist in making effort
To obtain what effort cannot get;
If you persist in reasoning
About what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed
By the very thing you seek.
To know when to stop
To know when you can get no further
By your own action,
This is the right beginning!
O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, “here or nowhere,” couldst thou only see.
To will what God wills is the only science that gives us rest.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
A Creed for Those Who Have Suffered
I asked God for strength that I might achieve…
I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health that I might do greater things…
I was given infirmity that I might do better things.
I asked for riches that I might be happy…
I was given poverty that I might be wise.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men…
I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life…
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for…
But everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among all men most richly blessed.
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
To shame the guise o’ the world, I will begin
The fashion, less without and more within.
Be cheerful; wipe thine eyes:
Some falls are means the happier to arise.
Whoever we are, we find ourselves, through self-observation, possessed of a certain small number of typical ways of reacting to the manifold impressions of incoming life. These mechanical reactions govern us.
There are two futures, one in time and one in scale, one horizontal — the other vertical and always there, just above our present state.
When you feel you are right you may be sure you are asleep.
Everything lies in relationship, in how you relate yourself to things. You cannot change the thing itself but you can change your relationship to it.
When we look at the world through the veil of our desires we make it small and narrow, and fail to perceive its full truth.
To find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves.
If you observe, you will see that there is an interval between two thoughts, between two emotions. In that interval, which is not the product of memory, there is an extraordinary freedom from the “me” and the “mine,” and that interval is timeless.
Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking ‘I’. And each time his ‘I’ is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.
One Love it is that pervades the whole world, few there are who know it fully: They are blind who hope to see it by the light of reason, that reason which is the cause of separation.
When experience is complete, there is no residue — that is the beauty of life.