Browse the Living Book by "The Sacred"

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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.

Fall in love with Wisdom and she will keep you… put her around you, and she will exalt you… honor her that she may embrace you… For what can anyone find shameful in the love of Wisdom or in the person who professes himself a “lover” of wisdom?

Origen (184 – 253)

The ruling faculty does not disturb itself, I mean, it does not frighten itself or cause itself pain… The guiding principle in itself wants nothing, unless it makes a want for itself, and therefore it is free.

Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180)

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing.

Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968)

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.

Socrates (470 – 399 B.C.E.)