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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.
Circumstance is a severe task master to the weak, an obedient servant to the strong.
Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; bliss is the same in subject or in king.
What is the use of the most sovereign of medicines while they stand on the sick man’s table? What is the mightiest of truths so long as it is not believed? The spiritually sick still mocks at the medicine offered; he will not know its cure.
Now understand me well — it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary… the road is before us! It is safe… I have tried it.
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.
Open up your inward sense, and see and hear.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
Desire spiritual gifts.
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
That which is non-existent can never come into being, and that which is can never cease to be. Those who have known the inmost Reality know also the nature of “is” and “is not.”
Stand apart from circumstances, and do not permit them to influence the mind.
That which I know immediately and intuitively transcends in certitude all other knowledge, for the certainty of it is bound up with the mind’s certainty of itself. I can no more doubt what I thus know than I can doubt my own existence.
Thinking produces noisy and wrong action. Seeing allows silent and right action.
Here a man shall be free from the noise and from the hurryings of this life: all states are full of noise and confusion; only the Valley of Humiliation is that empty and solitary place. Here a man shall not be so let and hindered in his contemplation as in other places he is apt to be. This is a valley that nobody walks in but those that love a pilgrim’s life… in former times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and have in this place found the words of life.
Therefore, if God’s essence is to be seen at all, it must be that the intellect sees it through the divine essence itself… so that in that vision the divine essence is both the object and the medium of vision.
While we are aware of thirsting after knowledge, we begin to seek here and there, wherever we think we can get some truth, and, failing to find it we become dissatisfied and seek in a fresh direction. All search is vain, until we begin to perceive that knowledge is within ourselves… that we must help ourselves… Then we may know that the sun is rising, that the morning is breaking for us, and, taking courage, we must persevere until the goal is reached.
Indeed it is well said, “In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.”
Obedience ensures greatness, while disobedience leads to defeat.
To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself on the right road, at the point where God would have him be — in harmony with God and the universe. This reliance gives strength and calm.
To be strong is to be happy.
There is some confusion on this point in the minds of many students. On attaining enlightenment a man does not attain omniscience. At most, he may receive a revelation of the inner operations of life and Nature, of the higher laws governing life and man. That is, he may also become a seer and find a cosmogony presented to his gaze. But the actuality in a majority of cases is that he attains enlightenment only, not cosmogonical seership.
Hardly one in ten thousand will have the strength of mind to ask himself seriously and earnestly, “Is that true?”
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
A little boy wearing the mask of a lion looks quite fierce. He runs out where his little sister is playing and shrieks out in a horrible voice, which shocks and terrifies his sister, making her cry out in terror, and making her attempt to escape from the frightening creature. But when her brother takes off the mask, she runs back to exclaim, “It is my nice brother after all!”