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Share in the accounts and discoveries of the many individuals who, just like you, set out to find new, true answers that could stand up to the test of passing time with its ever-changing conditions. Welcome these inward and uplifting thoughts as if they were your own, for in one sense… they are.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Who looks outside, dreams… who looks inside, awakes.
Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.
God dwells in you, as you, and you don’t have to “do” anything to be God-realized or Self-realized, it is already your true and natural state. Just drop all seeking, turn your attention inward, and sacrifice your mind to the One Self radiating in the Heart of your very being. For this to be your own presently lived experience, Self-Inquiry is the one direct and immediate way.
The thing about our choices is that after we have made them, they turn around and make us.
Every living being longs always to be happy, untainted by sorrow; and everyone has the greatest love for himself, which is solely due to the fact that happiness is his real nature. Hence, in order to realize that inherent and untainted happiness, which indeed he daily experiences when the mind is subdued in deep sleep, it is essential that he should know himself. For obtaining such knowledge the inquiry “Who am I?” in quest of the Self is the best means.
Love between human beings springs from a desire to be made free of another world than one’s own. Every true communion of lovers is a mutual discovery and recognition. Every passion is a passion for release, for that loss of one’s self by which alone one gains life.
At bottom there is but one subject of study… the mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.
The individual soul should seek for an intimate union with the soul of the universe.
You must perform your spiritual exercises without prophesying the nature of your reward. If you have a preconceived notion of the reward, you may or may not get it, but the very desire for that reward blocks the higher reward, which is above all mental prophecy. As you actually receive a few higher rewards, and your cosmic confidence rises, you feel from yourself that this way, which was at first so strange and frightening, is the way of endless riches.
Day by day we are born as night retires, no more possessing aught of our former life, estranged from our course of yesterday, and beginning today the life that remains.
It is an extraordinary fact and an extraordinary piece of evidence for the truth of religion, that a person’s long hours spent in silent communication with God, who never directly answers, is nevertheless manifestly a two-way communication. Such a person is gradually and permanently altered in the depths of his personality in ways which would be inconceivable if there was really nothing there at all.
Nothing will protect us from external compulsion as much as the control of ourselves, and, as Seneca says, to submit yourself to reason is the way to make everything else submit to you.
If a man is a good judge of silver, he will know, for the coin will tell its own story.
Little minds are too much hurt by little events. Great minds understand all of them, and remain untouched.
The stakes are high for real prayer.
You must gamble yourself
and be willing to lose.
When you have done this,
and your self shakes off
what you believed your self to be,
then no prayer remains,
only a sparkle of the eyes.
Knower and known are one.
If you penetrate the center of time and space,
You can bypass the addictions of the world,
You can become the world yourself.
For this is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love.
If thou but settest foot on this path, thou shalt see it everywhere.
No one can conquer an enemy without coming in site of him.
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life’s relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
If by patience, if by watching, I can secure one new ray of light, can feel myself elevated… shall I not watch ever?
It would be a grave error to suppose that Buddhism and Christianity merely offer various explanations of suffering, or worse, justifications and mystifications built on this ineluctable fact. On the contrary both show that suffering remains inexplicable most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape. Suffering is not a “problem” as if it were something we could stand outside and control. Suffering as both Christianity and Buddhism see it, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls the “Great Death” and Christianity calls “dying and rising with Christ.”
Once upon a time there was a Greek philosopher who told one of his disciples to give money to anyone who insulted him, for three years. At the end of this period of testing the master said to him, “Now you may go to Athens to learn wisdom.” Entering Athens the disciple met a wise man who was sitting by the city gate insulting all the passers-by. He did the same to the disciple who immediately burst out laughing. “Why do you laugh when I insult you?” demanded the wise man. “Because for three years I have been giving money to those who insulted me, and now you are doing it for nothing.” “Come into the city. It belongs to you,” replied the wise man. Abba John, who was in the habit of recounting this story would add: “That is the gateway to God.”
Now or Never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.
There is no death… Only a change of worlds.
