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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!
Sublime me,
Master Alchemist,
Again, again
And yet again
In the cracked
And sooty retort
Of my own unwilling
Skin.
In your cruel,
Impartial fires
Bone and brain
All vain desires,
Vanity and inward blight
Refine. Reform me
Free of what obscures your
Light.
Transparent
Make this vessel be
So to embrace,
Transmit and focus
Your life-searing energy
That so careless flows
To and through
Me. Amen.
Unless he attains inner unity man can have no ‘I,’ can have no will. The concept of “will” in relation to a man who has not attained inner unity is entirely artificial. The whole of life is composed of small things which we continually obey and serve. Our ‘I’ continually changes as in a kaleidoscope. Every external event which strikes us, every suddenly aroused emotion, becomes caliph for an hour, begins to build and govern, and is, in its turn, as unexpectedly deposed and replaced by something else. And the inner consciousness, without attempting to disperse the illusory designs created by the shaking of the kaleidoscope and without understanding that in reality the power that decides and acts is not itself, endorses everything and says about these moments of life in which different external forces are at work, “This is I, this is I.”
Man is a mystery. If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
In this patient, though uncheered obedience, we become prepared for light. The soul gathers force.
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. Slavery has so frightful an aspect to men accustomed to freedom, that it must steal upon them by degrees and must disguise itself in a thousand shapes, in order to be received.
Observe yourself as your greatest enemy would do… so shall you be your greatest friend.
The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may.
The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.
I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.
No one can see these truths in the manner that I have presented them, without being in some degree inclined to believe them, and in some degree stirred up to act in conformity to them.
If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.
Blessed art thou therefore if that thou canst stand still from self-thinking and self-willing, and canst stop the wheel of they imagination and senses… forasmuch as hereby thou mayest arrive at length to see the great Salvation of God being made capable of all manner of Divine sensations and Heavenly communications. Since it is nought indeed but thine own hearing and willing that do hinder thee, so that thou dost not see and hear God.
How can a soul which misunderstands itself have a sure idea of other creatures?
When the ego is brought to its knees in the dust, humiliated in its own eyes, however esteemed or feared, envied or respected in other men’s eyes, the way is opened for grace’s influx. Be assured that this complete humbling of the inner man will happen again and again and again until he is purified of all pride.
There is nothing new in the idea of sleep. People have been told almost since the creation of the world that they are asleep and that they must awaken. How many times is this said in the Gospels, for instance? “Awake,” “watch,” “sleep not.” Christ’s disciples even slept when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for the last time. It is all there.
To affect a quality, and to plume yourself upon it, is just to confess that you do not have it. Whether it is courage, or learning, or intellect, or wit, or success with women, or riches, or social position, or whatever else it may be that a man boasts of, you may conclude by his boasting about it that this is precisely the direction in which he is rather weak, for if a man really possesses any faculty to the full, it will not occur to him to make a great show of affecting it; he is quite content to know that he has it.
The moment we make up our mind, that we are going on with this determination to exact God over all, we step out of the world’s parade. We shall find ourself out of adjustment to the ways of the world, and increasingly so as we make progress in The Holy Way. We shall acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurging and its outgoing.
He employs his emotion who can make no use of his reason.
Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.
