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Silence is a source of Great Strength.
Stop thinking and end your problems.
Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?
He who knows others is wise,
He who knows himself is enlightened.
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Along the way to knowledge, many things are accumulated. Along the way to wisdom, many things are discarded.
The moment we make up our mind, that we are going on with this determination to exact God over all, we step out of the world’s parade. We shall find ourself out of adjustment to the ways of the world, and increasingly so as we make progress in The Holy Way. We shall acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurging and its outgoing.
Everyone of us has had experiences which we have not been able to explain: A sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine.
If you cannot pray over a thing, and cannot ask God to bless you in it, don’t do that thing. A secret that you would keep from God is a secret that you should keep from your own heart. Open thy heart to God, if He be there, the outspread world will be thy book of prayer.
Settle yourself in solitude, and you will come upon Him in yourself.
What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man. That is the entire Law. All the rest is commentary.
We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversations but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.
The spiritual life justifies itself to those who live it, but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say: that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God’s presence have been rare and brief — flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise, “God is here!”
William James (1842 – 1910), from The Varieties of Religious Experience, attributed to J. Trevor
Do not await the fulfillment of the divine cause you serve, but know that none of your efforts are fruitless, for they all advance the cause.
Someone once asked Dhu’l-Nun, “When does the Sufi reach his goal?”
He said, “When he is as he was where he was before he was.”
So God most high has said, “When I love a servant, I am his ear, so that he hears by me; I am his eye, so that he sees by me; and I am his tongue, so that he speaks by me.”
A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life… I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is beyond words?
Allah possesses a drink which is reserved for his intimate friends. When they drink they become intoxicated, when they become intoxicated they become joyful, when they become joyful they become sweet, when they become sweet they begin to melt, when they begin to melt they become free, when they become free they seek, when they seek they find, when they find they arrive, when they arrive they join, and when they join, there is no difference between them and their Beloved.
When he tries to extend his power over objects
Those objects gain control of him.
He who is controlled by objects
Loses possession of his inner self.
If he no longer values himself,
How can he value others?
If he no longer values others,
He is abandoned.
He has nothing left.
