Browse the Living Book by "The Seeker"

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Here you will read the innermost thoughts and feelings of inspired seekers who have gone before you. Some names you may know… others you will be glad to meet!

One Journey Quotations

 

Discovering this the mind becomes whole: the split between I and me, man and the world, the ideal and the real, comes to an end. Paranoia, the mind beside itself, becomes metanoia, the mind with itself and so free from itself.

Alan Watts (1915 – 1973)

Bring all opposites inside yourself and reconcile them. Understand that you are everywhere: on the land, in the sea, in the sky. Realize that you haven’t yet been begotten, that you are still in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you are dead, that you are in the world beyond the grave. Hold all this in your mind, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes. Then you can perceive God.

Hermetic Saying

The spiritual life justifies itself to those who live it, but what can we say to those who do not understand? This, at least, we can say: that it is a life whose experiences are proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God’s presence have been rare and brief — flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise, “God is here!”

William James (1842 – 1910), from The Varieties of Religious Experience, attributed to J. Trevor

I would have nobody to control me; I would be absolute… Now, he that is absolute can do what he likes; he that can do what he likes can take his pleasure; he that can take his pleasure can be content; and he that can be content has no more to desire. So the matter is over, and come what will, I am satisfied.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547 – 1616)

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

The Fourth Striving: From the beginning of one’s existence, to pay as quickly as possible for one’s arising and individuality, in order afterward to be free to lighten as much as possible the sorrow of our Common Father.

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866 – 1949)

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