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Do not sit at home, do not go to the forest,
But recognize mind wherever you are.
When one abides in complete and perfect enlightenment,
Where is Samsara and where is Nirvana?
When I attained Absolute Perfect Enlightenment, I attained absolutely nothing. That is why it is called Absolute Perfect Enlightenment.
Suffering, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the furthest shore.
Impermanent are all component things… nothing comes into existence but there is the seeds of its own dissolution.
He knows that intelligent contact with cosmic conscious minds assists self conscious individuals in the ascent to the higher plane. He therefore hopes, by bringing about, or at least facilitating this contact, to aid men and women in making the almost infinitely important step in question.
The “resurrection” is not of the so-called dead, but of the living who are “dead” in the sense of never having entered upon true life.
During the gap — infinitesimal though it be — between two thoughts, the ego vanishes. Hence it may truly be said that with each thought it reincarnates anew. There is no real need to wait for the series of long-lived births to be passed through before liberation can be achieved. The series of momentary births also offers this opportunity, provided a man knows how to use it.
There is some confusion on this point in the minds of many students. On attaining enlightenment a man does not attain omniscience. At most, he may receive a revelation of the inner operations of life and Nature, of the higher laws governing life and man. That is, he may also become a seer and find a cosmogony presented to his gaze. But the actuality in a majority of cases is that he attains enlightenment only, not cosmogonical seership.
As he advances in the idea of being detached from results and possessions, he will inevitably have to advance in the idea of being detached from concern about his own spiritual development. If he is to relinquish the ego, he will also have to relinquish his attempts to improve it. This applies just as much to its character as to its ideas.
When the ego is brought to its knees in the dust, humiliated in its own eyes, however esteemed or feared, envied or respected in other men’s eyes, the way is opened for grace’s influx. Be assured that this complete humbling of the inner man will happen again and again and again until he is purified of all pride.
No announcements tell the world that he has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming man’s greatest victory — over himself. This is in fact the quietest moment of his whole life.
In faith, man becomes certain that he has himself not in himself.
Progress is the law of life; man is not man as yet.
Who keeps one thing in view makes all things serve.
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware.
In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents — but at the same time, in order to replace them, we must kill off our fantasy selves. Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he does so, he is still in a state of rebellion, a perpetual state of immaturity…
Ultimately, to overcome our fantasy self is the supreme contribution that a man can make to mankind. All the fantasies that are around us, that infect the collective human organism, are in the end just one fantasy, made up of all the separate unresolved images and acts of self assertion that are fed into it from each individual fantasy-self of all the thousands of millions of human beings on earth…
Every man who asserts his ego against the general framework in any way, however small, or adds to the sum of unresolved imagery, however idly, is playing his tiny part in increasing the sum of the world’s discords and miseries…
However much one wishes to change the outside world, the only thing one can change or have any control over is ultimately oneself. Which is why the greatest good any man can do to change the world is the least dramatic act of all — to withdraw his own contribution from the general sum of evil.
The highest good can only be beheld by those who are very pure in spirit, and can only be tasted when the passions are as they should be. This is why Saint Augustine prays: “O Lord, let me taste in my will what I know in my mind, and feel through love what I grasp through awareness.”
Everything I say must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.
Whatever you think appears in consciousness as a show. That’s the way thought works to display its content, as a show of imagination. Therefore if you think the observer is separate from the observed, it’s going to appear in consciousness as two different entities. The point is that the words will seem to be coming from the observer who knows, who sees, and therefore they are the truth, they are a description of the truth. That’s the illusion.
But by never coming to an end it seems to make some attempt at rivialing that which it can never fully realize in its being.
