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Despite the many differences that seem to exist between peoples the world over — regardless of culture, tradition, environment, or heredity — there is but one seeker, one search, and one sacred object of our desire. The celestial source of this sacred being doesn’t just live within us… we are, in fact, one with it.
It is wonderful, Lord! It is wonderful, Lord! It is as if, Lord, one might set upright that which had been upturned, or might reveal what was hidden, or might point out the path to one who had gone astray, or might bring an oil lamp into the darkness so that those with eyes might see material shapes.
Genius is eternal patience.
From this kind of knowledge arises the most perfect satisfaction and contentment.
The being who has attained harmony, and every being may attain it, has found his place in the order of the universe and represents the divine thought as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression of right, order, law and truth; it is greater than time, and represents eternity.
The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same.
The boundless sea has absorbed the river and its limited waters. Now the river shares in all that the sea has. The sea carries the river along; the river cannot carry itself along. The river has become one with the sea. No, the river does not have all the qualities of the sea, but it is, nonetheless, in the sea.
All things good come to those for whom the Good is all things.
The bamboo shadows
Sweep the steps
But raise no dust.
The Peace you long for also longs for you.
You who love instruction and are eager to listen, receive once again the sacred words: delight yourselves in the honey of wisdom, for it is written, “Good words are honeycombs and their sweetness is the healing of the soul.”
When someone whose mind is but partially developed sees something clothed in some semblance of beauty, he believes that this thing is beautiful in its own nature… but someone who has purified the eyes of his soul and is trained to see beautiful things makes use of the visible as a springboard to rise to the contemplation of the spiritual.
Marvel at your Lord not only because He has made heaven and the sun, but also because He has made the ant… Consider how prudent the ant is, and consider how God has implanted in so small a body such an increasing desire for work.
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God, above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.
All day long a little burro labors, sometimes with heavy loads on her back and sometimes just with worries about things that bother only burros. And worries, as we know, can be more exhausting than physical labor. Once in a while a kind monk comes to her stable and brings a pear, but more than that, he looks into the burro’s eyes and touches her ears and for a few seconds the burro is free and even seems to laugh, because love does that. Love frees.
The idea of God is the idea of our own spiritual natures enlarged to infinity.
The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception — that is to say, when using the sense of sight and hearing, or some other sense — for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses — is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal), and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change… But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
Listen! The Mighty Being is awake, and doth with His eternal motion make, a sound like thunder — everlastingly.
For if Life were questioned a thousand years and asked, “Why Live?”, and if there were an answer, it could be no more than this: “I live only to live!” And that is because Life is its own reason for being, springs from its own source, and goes on and on, without ever asking why — just because it is life. Thus, if you ask a genuine person, that is, one who acts (uncalculatingly) from his heart, “Why are you doing that?”, he will reply in the only possible way: “I do it because I do it!”
Man judges all things by his abstractions — good, evil, virtue, crime. His formulas of right are his scales, and his justice is blind. The justice of God sees — in that is everything.
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
Real ‘I’ is the Messiah, for whom the creature is waiting.
He that follows the advice of reason has a mind that is elevated above the reach of injury; that sits above the clouds, in a calm and quiet ether, and with a brave indifference hears the rolling thunders grumble and burst under his feet.
One Song
What is praised is one, so the praise is one too,
many jugs being poured into a huge basin.
All religions, all this singing, one song.
The differences are just illusion and vanity.
Sunlight looks a little different
on this wall than it does on that wall,
and a lot different on this other one,
but it is still one light.
We have borrowed these clothes,
these time-and-space personalities,
from a light, and when we praise,
we are pouring them back in.
When a farmer is irrigating his field the water is already in the canals, only there are gates which keep the water in. The farmer opens these gates, and the water flows in by itself, by the law of gravitation. So, all human progress and power are already in everything; this perfection is every man’s nature, only it is barred in and prevented from taking its proper course. If anyone can take the bar off, in rushes nature. Then the man attains the powers which are his already.
I have never written the music that was in my heart to write. Perhaps I never shall with this brain and these fingers, but I know that hereafter it will be written. When, instead of these few inlets of the senses through which we now secure impressions from all without, there shall be a flood of impressions from all sides, and instead of these few tones of our little octave there shall be an infinite score of harmonies — for I feel it, I am sure of it. This world of music, whose borders even now I have scarcely entered, is a reality, is immortal.
