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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.
To be strong is to be happy.
The tempest threatens before it rises upon us; buildings creak before they fall to pieces.
Circumstances are things round about; we are in them, not under them.
Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians — the inability to pronounce the word “No.” To be able to speak that word and to live alone, are the only two means to preserve one’s freedom and one’s character.
In yourself lies the sweetness of your charm, from you does it blossom, in you it sojourns, within you it rests, in your own self you must search for the jubilant quality of your conscience. For that reason Solomon says, “Drink water out of your own cistern and the streams out of your own well.”
You have no freedom or power of will to assume any holy temper, or take hold of such degrees of goodness, as you have a mind to have… But you have a true and full freedom of will and choice… to leave and give up your helpless self to the operation of God on your soul. This is the truth of the freedom of your will.
I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.
What is a man’s first duty? The answer brief: To be himself.
The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
Few things are needed to make a wise man happy; nothing can make a foolish man content, and that is why most men are miserable.
We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.
We receive but what we give.
Like the monist I plunge into the all-inclusive One. But the one is so perfect that as it receives me and I lose myself in it, I can find in it the ultimate perfection of my own individuality.
We must follow, not force Providence.
To live in the light of the universal order is to be awake. To turn aside into our own microcosm is to go to sleep.
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Sickness is not cured by saying “Medicine,” but by drinking it. So a man is not free by the name of the Eternal without discerning the Eternal.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
Learn avidly. Question repeatedly what you have learned. Analyze it carefully. Then put what you have learned into practice intelligently.
If men could see their true position and could understand all the horror of it, they would be unable to remain where they are even for one second. They would begin to seek a way out and they would quickly find it, because there is a way out, but men fail to see it simply because they are hypnotized. Kundalini is the force that keeps them in a hypnotic state. “To awaken” for man means to be “dehypnotized.”
The only useful question in this matter is this: how a man may know that he is in the way of regeneration, that he is spiritually alive, and growing in the inward and new man.
If you want what visible reality can give, you’re an employee.
If you want the unseen world, you’re not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish, but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is love’s confusing joy.
Start first with yourself and abandon yourself. Truly, if you won’t first leave yourself, wherever you may go you will find obstacles and war, anywhere. They who seek peace in external things — in places or in ways and methods, in persons or works, in monasticism or isolation, in poverty or humility, in anything, however great that might be — not one of them has the least value and it does not bring peace at all.
They who ask this way, ask wrong. The further they go, the less they find what they seek. They walk like the man who has lost his way: the more he walks the more his delusion grows… But if someone abandons himself, whatever else he might keep, whether riches or honours, or anything, he has abandoned all things. See yourself and wherever you find him, see him off. The more you go out of all things, that much, neither less nor more, God comes in you with all that is His.
To see small beginnings is clearness of sight.
“Don’t look for God,” the Master said. “Just look, and all will be revealed.”
“But how is one to look?”
“Each time you look at anything, see only what is there and nothing else.”
The disciples were bewildered, so the Master made it simpler: “For instance: when you look at the moon, see the moon and nothing else.”
“What else could one see except the moon when one looks at the moon?”
“A hungry person could see a ball of cheese. A lover, the face of his beloved.”
