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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!
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.
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
The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and “consolers,” offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil.
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
Natural man is said to be dead however good his actions may be from the civil and moral point of view.
All the water in the world,
However hard it tried,
Could never, never sink a ship,
Unless it got inside.
And all the evil in the world,
The blackest kind of sin.
Can never hurt you one least bit —
Unless you let it in!
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
People stop being children when they start laughing at their ignorance.
So hath God by rational methods enabled us to love others better than ourselves, and thereby made us the most glorious creatures. Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love. But when we do love ourselves, and self-love is satisfied infinitely in all its desires and possible demands, then it is easily led to regard the Benefactor more than itself, and for His sake overflows abundantly to all others. So that God by satisfying my self-love, hath enabled and engaged me to love others.
God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror of glass, capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light.
If you don’t get what you want, you suffer. If you get what you don’t want, you suffer. Even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change, free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
The moment that any man really comes to recognize that which is absolute Truth — namely, that one Spirit, even the Father, being made manifest in the Son, ever lives at the center of all human beings — he will know that he can cease forever from any undue anxiety about bringing others into the same external fold that he is in. If your friend or your son or your husband or your brother does not see Truth as you see it, do not try by repeated external arguments to convert him.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
Everything is wrong in the world, everything in a state of confusion, because man has not this truth, and so remains unfinished.
The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception — that is to say, when using the sense of sight and hearing, or some other sense — for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses — is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal), and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change… But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.