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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.
An individual drop can be merged with the ocean, and still remain meaningful. He has found his “place.”
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.
When people are made righteous by philosophy they have stored help for themselves and inward perception which leads to reverence for God.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being — free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies — and therefore you can find out what religion is.
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
It is not at all necessary to be great, as long as we are in harmony with the order of the universe.
The highest enjoyment is that of being contented with ourselves. It is in order to deserve this contentment that we are placed here on earth and endowed with liberty.
I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
He need go nowhere, because wherever he is, that which is to save him, and that which he is to be saved from, is always with him.
Ramakrishna used to tell a story of some men who went into a mango orchard and busied themselves in counting the leaves, the twigs, and the branches, examining their colour, comparing their size, and noting down everything most carefully, and then got up a learned discussion on each of these topics… But one of them, more sensible than the others, did not care for all these things, and instead thereof, began to eat the mango fruit. And was he not wise? So leave the counting of leave and twigs and this note taking to others… You can never once see a strong spiritual man among these “leaf-counters.”
Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
You do not see God. Love and you possess him… for God offers himself to us at once. Love me, he cries to us, and you shall possess me. You cannot love me without possessing me.
You’ve been walking the ocean’s edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under, and deeper under,
a thousand times deeper!
All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.
Allah possesses a drink which is reserved for his intimate friends. When they drink they become intoxicated, when they become intoxicated they become joyful, when they become joyful they become sweet, when they become sweet they begin to melt, when they begin to melt they become free, when they become free they seek, when they seek they find, when they find they arrive, when they arrive they join, and when they join, there is no difference between them and their Beloved.
A man must relate himself to new forces, coming from that which he has not realized, through seeing things differently, through touching ideas that have transforming power and that can only be proved by his own experience of them and never evidentially by an appeal to the outer world of the sense.
Do you earnestly ponder and sincerely try to understand?
Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West, and then seek.
In proportion as our own mind is enlarged, we discover a greater number of men of originality. Common-place people see no difference between one man and another.
Receive every inward and outward trouble, every disappointment, pain, uneasiness, temptation, darkness, and desolation, with both your hands, as a true opportunity and blessed occasion of dying to self, and entering into a fuller fellowship with your self-denying, suffering savior. Look at no inward or outward trouble in any other view; reject every other thought about it, and then every kind of trial and distress will become the blessed day of your prosperity. Be afraid of seeking or finding comfort in anything but God alone: For that which gives you comfort, takes so much of your heart from God.
Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Nothing can trouble him more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will which hold us bound to the world… as desire, fear, envy, anger, drag us here and there in constant pain. He now looks back smiling and at rest on the delusions of the world, which once were able to move and agonize his spirit also.
There is value in everything that happens to you, especially in those events that appear sorrowful or troublesome. Suffering can supply us with the very ending of suffering, if only we listen to its lesson. Fear, when carefully examined, can free us from fear.
To do rightly by the cosmos depends on timing: right doing, right being at the right time and place. This right guidance, found in every heart, finds its source in the universal Heart. This rightness is ultimate good, ultimate happiness and joy. The joy comes naturally to and through a life lived in moment-by-moment contact with the truth behind all nature, for its own sake and not for anything else.