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Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
The stakes are high for real prayer.
You must gamble yourself
and be willing to lose.
When you have done this,
and your self shakes off
what you believed your self to be,
then no prayer remains,
only a sparkle of the eyes.
Knower and known are one.
If you penetrate the center of time and space,
You can bypass the addictions of the world,
You can become the world yourself.
Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
When you depart out,
He will enter it.
In you,
void of yourself,
will He display His beauties.
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own special definite qualities: that he is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. Men are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would not be true to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he is bad and stupid. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this is false. Men are like rivers: the water is the same in one and all; but every river is narrow here, more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now dull, now cold, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears in himself the germs of every human quality; but sometimes one quality manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
He who strikes terror into others is himself in continual fear.
Man is not some simple object, nor is he cast in one pattern, but God has made to dwell in the constitution of a single creature a host of forces mingled together and with full-toned voices. We are, I think, a monstrous animal more extraordinary than the Hydra and still more many-headed. For not with the same part of our nature, of course, do we think and desire or feel pain and suffer anger, nor is our fear from the same source as our pleasure. Again you will observe how there is a male element in these organs and a female, and that there is courage and also cowardice. There are, in sooth, all kinds of opposites within us and a certain medial force of nature runs through them which we call “mind.”
It is useless for the “self” to try to “purify itself,” or for the “self” to “make a place in itself” for God.
We must eradicate from the soul
all fear and terror of what
comes towards man
out of the future.
We must acquire serenity
in all feelings and sensations
about the future.
We must look forward
with absolute equanimity
to everything that may come.
And we must think only that
whatever comes is given to us
by a world-directive
full of wisdom.
It is part of what we
must learn in this age,
namely, to live out of pure
trust, without any security
in existence.
Trust in the ever present
help of the spiritual world.
Truly, nothing else will do
if our courage is not to fail us.
And let us seek the awakening
from within ourselves,
every morning
and every evening.
In deepest solitude
I found the narrow way,
a secret giving such release
that I was stunned and stammering,
rising above all science.
To come to the pleasure you have not
You must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
You must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
You must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
You must go by a way in which you are not.
He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.
Consider, O discerning man, that you are the image of God and the bond of all creation, both of the heavenly and the terrestrial beings, and whenever you bend your head to worship and glorify God, all the creations, both heavenly and terrestrial, bow their heads with you and in you, to worship God. And whenever you do not worship and glorify Him, all the creations grieve over you and turn against you, and you will fall from grace.
The mirror is thoroughly egoless and mindless. If a flower comes it reflects a flower, if a bird comes it reflects a bird. It shows a beautiful object as beautiful, an ugly object as ugly. Everything is revealed as it is. There is no discriminating mind or self-consciousness on the part of the mirror. If something comes, the mirror reflects. If it disappears, the mirror just lets it disappear… no traces of anything are left behind. Such non-attachment, the state of no-mind, or the truly free working of a mirror is compared here to the pure and lucid wisdom of Buddha.
For each believes his lamp to be the light of day!
Why does no man confess his vices? Because he is yet in them. It is for a waking man to tell his dream.
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare. It is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
How can a soul which misunderstands itself have a sure idea of other creatures?
Who teaches men to be grateful pleads the cause not only of men, but of the gods for they, being placed above all desires, cannot be of want of anything, yet we can nevertheless offer them our gratitude.