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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.
Easy is the descent into the lower world. Night and day the door of glowing dis stands open. But to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this is the work.
Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses — or, in biblical language, “God.” This is no fancy. It is a fact. Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds, “Aha! This is my story. This is something that I had always wanted to say but haven’t been able to say.”
Enter yourself, let self-honesty turn you in the right direction, after which self-awareness lives your life for you. Wishing for something other than darkness is already a bit of light. Have no fear of exposing the illusion that your present world is a false world, for the end of the old reveals the new. Change starts with even the dim realization of being betrayed by our own faulty thoughts. Self-renewal occurs spontaneously when habitual thoughts are dropped. Few people realize how little truth they can take, but those who do will become new.
Reason shall prevail with me more than popular opinion.
Resign yourself to the sequence of things, forgetting the changes of life, and you shall enter into the pure, the divine, the One.
In the seen, there is only the seen,
in the heard, there is only the heard,
in the sensed, there is only the sensed,
in the cognized, there is only the cognized.
Thus you should see that
indeed there is no thing here;
this, Bahiya, is how you should train yourself.
Since, Bahiya, there is for you
in the seen, only the seen,
in the heard, only the heard,
in the sensed, only the sensed,
in the cognized, only the cognized,
and you see that there is no thing here,
you will therefore see that
indeed there is no thing there.
As you see that there is no thing there,
you will see that
you are therefore located neither in the world of this,
nor in the world of that,
nor in any place
betwixt the two.
This alone is the end of suffering.
If you are content with the old world, try to preserve it; it is sick… But if you can no longer live in the eternal conflict between your convictions and life, thinking one way and acting another, take it upon yourselves to leave the shelter of the pale and ruinous arches.
Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is.
Inquire of yourself as soon as you awaken from sleep whether it will make any difference to you, if another does or does not do what is just and right. It will make no difference.
What is rational is real, and what is real is rational.
This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.
To shame the guise o’ the world, I will begin
The fashion, less without and more within.
O scion of Bharat, I am also the knower of all the individual fields of activity. The understanding of the body as the field of activities, and the soul and God as the knowers of the field, this I hold to be true knowledge.
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us on a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.
Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
There is a force within that gives you life — seek that. In your body there lies a precious jewel — seek that. Oh, wandering Sufi, if you are in search of the greatest treasure, don’t look outside, look within, and Seek That.
To find life’s purpose we must go through the door of ourselves.
He who is firm in will moulds the world to himself.
There are, by the direction of the Lawgiver, certain good and substantial steps, placed even through the very midst of this Slough… these steps are hardly seen… notwithstanding, the steps be there; but the ground is good when they are once got in at the Gate.
To see small beginnings is clearness of sight.
It is wretched business to be digging a well just as thirst is conquering you.
No announcements tell the world that he has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming man’s greatest victory — over himself. This is in fact the quietest moment of his whole life.
Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Along the way to knowledge, many things are accumulated. Along the way to wisdom, many things are discarded.
This great, good light and comfort is inwardly revealed only to those who are… inwardly illuminated, and who know how to dwell inwardly with themselves.
