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For whilst in one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute truth or reason is not a life that is foreign to us. If it is above us, it is also within us. In yielding to it we are not submitting to an outward and arbitrary law or to an external authority, but to a law which has become our own law, an authority which has become enthroned in the inmost essence of our being.
It is the prerogative of man’s spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own.
The moment that any man really comes to recognize that which is absolute Truth — namely, that one Spirit, even the Father, being made manifest in the Son, ever lives at the center of all human beings — he will know that he can cease forever from any undue anxiety about bringing others into the same external fold that he is in. If your friend or your son or your husband or your brother does not see Truth as you see it, do not try by repeated external arguments to convert him.
Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually. You are not living by human laws. Expect miracles and see them take place. Hold ever before you the thought of prosperity and abundance, and know that doing so sets in motion forces that will bring it into being.
Be surprised at nothing. Let peace and stillness flood through you and envelop you completely in its cloak. Put on the whole armour of love — and yet feel, feel very deeply. Let tears flow, washing away impurities until you feel clean within and clean without. Become like an empty vessel ready to be filled with life’s nectar.
Grief should be the instructor of the wise… sorrow is knowledge. They who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal, truth, — the tree of knowledge is not that of life.
While reason is still tracking down the secret, you end your quest on the open field of love.
When you sincerely enter into prayer, you will come forth with all your prayers answered. But a hundred prayers that lack sincerity will leave you still the bungler that you are, your work a failure. Prayers said from habit are like the dust that scatters in the wind. The prayers that reach God’s court are uttered by the soul.
Bring all of yourself to his door. Bring only a part, and you’ve brought nothing at all.
Love’s conqueror is he whom love conquers.
No tongue can tell Your secret
For the measure of the word obscures Your nature
But the gift of the ear
Is that it hears
What the tongue cannot tell.
It is useless quibbling over a mere word, even if that word is God. To accept or reject it, when we have no knowledge of what it may represent, is equally inappropriate. God is a mystery, and the mystery remains, whatever name we give to it.
Hakim Sanai (circa 1080 – 1141), from The Walled Garden of Truth
The special form of friendship and love which grows between teacher and pupil is simultaneously a bond of friendship between man and God. Such a process is the very reverse of hero-worship. The teacher systematically and very effectively rejects those manifestations from his charges which have their origins in the self. Pupils are weaned at the outset from the tendency to fixate and identify with authority figures. If this first lesson is not learnt, there are no others. The teacher is merely a channel of communication. His presence may elicit love and devotion from those around him, but these are destined not for himself but for the reality his teaching represents.
Hakim Sanai (circa 1080 – 1141), from The Walled Garden of Truth
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder.
Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself.
Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery — the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets — is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.
The bamboo shadows
Sweep the steps
But raise no dust.
If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don’t seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.
