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The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.
A little boy wearing the mask of a lion looks quite fierce. He runs out where his little sister is playing and shrieks out in a horrible voice, which shocks and terrifies his sister, making her cry out in terror, and making her attempt to escape from the frightening creature. But when her brother takes off the mask, she runs back to exclaim, “It is my nice brother after all!”
True philosophy is that which renders us to ourselves, and all others who surround us, better, and at the same time more content, more patient, more calm, and more ready for all decent and pure enjoyment.
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
The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution.
You must have patience. He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time.
Smoldering joy, oft-puffed by meditation,
Blinding my tearful eyes,
Burst into immortal flames of bliss,
Consumed my tears, my frame, my all.
Thou art I, I am Thou,
Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!
Tranquilled, unbroken thrill, eternally living, ever new peace!
Enjoyable beyond imagination of expectancy, samadhi bliss!
Not a mental chloroform
Or unconscious state without wilful return,
Samadhi but extends my conscious realm
Beyond limits of the mortal frame
To the farthest boundary of eternity
Where I, the Cosmic Sea,
Watch the little ego floating in me.
All of society lives from an endless deceptive practice. That practice is to perform the unnecessary and the harmful while trying to make them look like the necessary and the beneficial.
I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts.
Let none of us entertain the desire for possessions, for what gain is it to acquire those things which we cannot take with us? Why not rather acquire those that we can take: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, understanding, charity, love of the poor, faith in Christ, goodness, hospitality? If we obtain these, we shall find them there before us preparing a welcome for us in the land of the meek.
Enough to think that truth can be;
Come sit we where the roses glow;
Indeed he knows not how to know
who knows not also how to unknow.
Consider what your bondage is in the world. What do you not have to suffer to keep the esteem of those men whom you scorn?
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.
All we taste, against all we lack, is like a single drop of water against the whole sea… for we feed upon His Immensity, which we cannot devour, and we yearn after His Infinity, which we cannot attain.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.
It (an authentic teaching) must give us an explanation of our opposition to God and to our own good. It must teach us the remedies for these infirmities, and the means of obtaining these remedies.
The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Who seeks, and will not take when once ’tis offered, shall never find it more.
