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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!
It is time to explain myself… let us stand up.
You have to make your own world, instead of succumbing to the one that presses on you. You have to turn the tables on what appears to be fate or the full weight of society. Against the greatest odds, you have to keep your wits about you and refuse to surrender to anyone or anything less than divine. You have to be faithful to the mystery taking place in your heart, rather than to any idea or system that would try, with the best of motives, to disempower you and make you theirs.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?
Thou art not for the fashion of these times,
Where none will sweat but for promotion,
And having that, do choke their service up
Even with the having: it is not so with thee.
God will not tell you that you should desire Him above all else, because He wants your love to be freely given, without “prompting.” That is the whole secret in the game of this universe. He who created us yearns for our love. He wants us to give it spontaneously, without His asking. Our love is the one thing God does not possess, unless we choose to bestow it. So, you see, even the Lord has something to attain: our love. And we shall never be happy until we give it.
One of the marvels of the world
is the sight of a soul sitting in prison
with the key in his hand.
Who conquers indolence will conquer all the rest.
Think of your own faults the first part of the night when you are awake, and of the faults of others the latter part of the night when you are asleep.
There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.
He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions — such a man is… a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being — an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is a slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.
So God most high has said, “When I love a servant, I am his ear, so that he hears by me; I am his eye, so that he sees by me; and I am his tongue, so that he speaks by me.”
No announcements tell the world that he has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming man’s greatest victory — over himself. This is in fact the quietest moment of his whole life.
If a man empties himself of himself, who can harm him?
We owe a great debt to those who point out our faults for they humiliate us… They prepare for us the exercise of correction and freedom from fault.
Call forth in everyone only the remembrance of God, and of the Heaven that is in him. For where you would have your brother be, there will you think you are. Hear not his appeal to hell and littleness, but only his call for Heaven and greatness. Forget not that his call is yours, and answer him with me.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
To imagine that five hundred men, drawn from every corner of the kingdom, will make a good law! Is it not a dreary joke, for which the people will sooner or later have to pay? They have a change of masters, that is all.
The special form of friendship and love which grows between teacher and pupil is simultaneously a bond of friendship between man and God. Such a process is the very reverse of hero-worship. The teacher systematically and very effectively rejects those manifestations from his charges which have their origins in the self. Pupils are weaned at the outset from the tendency to fixate and identify with authority figures. If this first lesson is not learnt, there are no others. The teacher is merely a channel of communication. His presence may elicit love and devotion from those around him, but these are destined not for himself but for the reality his teaching represents.
Hakim Sanai (circa 1080 – 1141), from The Walled Garden of Truth
Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!
No negative state has the right to rule over your life.
