Great Throughts Treasury

"All thoughts can be traced back to a single thought which rests at the very base of their operations. Can you not see now that the thought of personality, the sense of ?I,? is such a basic thought?"

"Although he is normally quite unconscious of this connection with the Overself, once at least in a lifetime there is a flash which visits him and breaks the unconsciousness. He has a glimpse of his highest possibility. But the clearness and intensity of this glimpse depend upon his receptivity. They may amount to little or much."

"An aid is bhakti, love. Love is essential to meditation; it is a binding force comprised of devotion and reverence. The aim is to become united. Success in meditation is to become one with the Higher Self (unity). Meditation should be a yearning to come home to one?s place in the universe."

"An intuitive feeling is one untainted by the ego?s wishes, uncolored by its aversions."

"Art fulfils its higher purpose, acquires more valuable significance, when it becomes a vehicle for spiritual beauty."

"As one matures and becomes a quester, the old way of making a decision simply on the basis of using reason is no longer enough. It is fine to base minor decisions on reason but a larger decision should be brought into meditation, or if meditation is not sufficiently developed, try prayer to the Overself. The best time is before you fall asleep at night. Upon awakening in the morning try to catch your thought at that moment, in the state between sleeping and waking. Take that thought and see what it tells you. If you get nothing, try again the next evening. You may have to keep this up for several nights until you do get some sort of understanding of what seems or feels to be the best idea of what to do. You will know because your thoughts and feelings will both tell you it?s right, they will reinforce each other. If the thoughts seem unclear and you still feel uncertain, continue to ask the question. The answer does not always come through your mind; the answer may come through an event. During the day when you?re relaxed it will suddenly strike you. Also, it may come through a dream. If you want to check the answer you have received, ask someone who is more advanced in meditation to meditate on your decision."

"Association with or proximity to such a man not only brings out what is best in them but also, when it ends, invokes the reaction of what is worst."

"At the center of each man, each animal, each plant, each cell and each atom, there is a complete stillness. A seemingly empty stillness, yet it holds the divine energies and the divine idea for that thing."

"Awareness is the very nature of one?s being: it is the Self."

"Because philosophy includes and extends religion, it necessarily supports it. But it does not support the erroneous dogmas and misguided practices which are cloaked under religion?s mantle, nor the human exploitations which are found in its history."

"Because the metaphysics of truth deals with root ideas, and because in a mentalist universe such ideas are naturally more potentially powerful and more important than materialist ones, the metaphysics of truth become the most worthwhile study in which man?s intellect can engage. For these ideas provide him with the right patterns for shaping physical existence."

"Between the passing out of the invisible vital-forces-body at the end of each incarnation and its entry into that state of consciousness which is death, the same interval reappears. If the dying man can lift himself up to it, seize upon it, and not let it escape him, he will then enter into heaven--the true heaven. And it was to remind him of this fact and to help him achieve this feat that the ancient priests attended his last moments and chanted the pertinent passages from these books. This mysterious interval makes its appearance throughout life and even at death, and yet men notice it not and miss an opportunity. It happens not only at the entry into death but also in between two breaths. It is possible to go even further and say that the interval reappears for a longer period between two incarnations, for there is then the blocking out of all impressions of the past prior to taking on a new body. Plato must have known it."

"But a man cannot profit by this lonelier life, nor find it pleasurable unless he has more inner reserves than most others or unless he actively seeks to gain them."

"But all this does not mean that philosophy asks us to mistrust the witness of our senses. That is correct enough for all ordinary, practical uses. But it does ask us to search more deeply into the significance of all sense-experience."

"But one can only have the right to exercise such self-reliance if one pays for it in the coin of self-discipline."

"But selflessness does not mean the surrender of one?s own ego to someone else?s ego. Renouncing the personal will does not mean becoming the creature of another person?s will. Humility does not becoming the helpless victim of other people?s wrong-doing. The only surrender that we are entitled to make is surrender to the Higher Power."

"By grace I mean the manifestation of God?s friendliness."

"Can the observer who sees, the knower who knows be himself an object to be perceived? No! says the intellectual; Yes! says the mystic philosopher."

"Consciousness beyond the usual everyday consciousness can be reached only after a disciplined training of the mind. This suppresses its activity in thinking and banishes its extroverted worldliness of character."

"Consider the fact that our individual lives are totally suspended during sleep, that the waves of personal consciousness then merge utterly in the ocean. How clearly this shows the Divine to be also the Infinite and Universal, our lack of true spirituality, and our possession at best of its pale reflection! For where else could we go to sleep except in this Infinite and Universal Mind. Yet we know it not! TO get rid of such ignorance, to attain transcendental insight into the fourth state of being, is the most wonderful of all the tasks which this philosophy sets before us."

"Cultivate calmness; try to keep the balance of your mind from being upset."

"Death is the entrance to a new kind of being, a renewed form of life, another period in which old experience is assimilated and the next phase (reincarnation) prepared for."

"Deep silence has a melody of its own, a sweetness unknown amid the harsh discords of the world?s sounds."

"Despite all his psychical knowledge and personal attainment, the sage never loses his deep sense of the mystery which is at the heart of existence, which is God."

"Do not confuse detachment with callous indifference. Do not search after impossible goals. A worthy goal for human beings cannot be devoid of human feelings, however elevated they may be: it cannot be a glacial one."

"Egoism, the limiting of consciousness to individual life as separate from the one infinite life, is the last barrier to attainment of unity with the infinite life."

"Energy radiates whether in the form of continuous waves or disconnected particles ? ?moment to moment? ? Buddha called it. It is this cosmic radiation which becomes ?matter.?"

"Epistemology is the enemy, the devil of yogis, mystics and religious teachers because it pries into the truth, the source and the validity of the knowledge they claim. Therefore it is the most difficult part of philosophy."

"Even though he learns all these truths, he has only learnt them intellectually. They must be applied in the environment, they must be deeply felt in the heart, and, finally, they must be established as the Consciousness whence they are derived."

"Every act is to be brought into the field of awareness and done deliberately."

"Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness."

"Everyone is crucified by his own ego."

"Everything in Nature is included in this law of contrasting conditions. Nothing is excepted from it. Even the universe of definite spherical forms exist in its opposite ? formless space. We humans may not like the law; we would prefer light without shadow, joy without pain; but such is the World-Idea, God?s thought. It is the product of infinite wisdom and as such we may trust and accept that it could not be otherwise."

"First, remember that It is appearing as ego; then remember to think that you are It; finally cease to think of It so you may be free of thoughts to be It!"

"For those who have made sufficient progress with the Quest, death is not a frightening experience. Once the exit from the body has been made, the rest is pleasant and peaceful."

"God is Mind and they that would worship it in truth must worship it mentally. The ostentatious ceremonies set up by paid professionals enable men and women to obtain pleasing emotional effects but they do not enable them to worship God. A building becomes a sacred temple when it ceases to here phonographic mumblings and when it ceases to witness theatrical mimicries, and when it provides a fitting place where its visitors can engage in undisturbed silent and inward-turned communion with their own deeper Mind."

"God will appear to us in Spirit alone, never in Space. To see him is to see the playing and posturing of our own mind."

"God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind."

"He begins with an unthinking and immature religious attitude, proceeds to the meditational experiments and personal experience of mysticism or the rational abstractions of metaphysics, and ends in the integral all-embracing all-transcending life of philosophy."

"He can find the nothingness within himself only after he has evaluated the nothingness of himself. The mystery of the Great Void does not disclose itself to the smugly satisfied or the arrogantly proud or the intellectually conceited."

"He is to sacrifice all the lower emotions on the alar of this quest. He is to place upon it anger, lust and aggressive egoism as and when each situation arises when one or another of them shows its ugly self. All are to be burnt up steadily, if little by little, at such opportunities. This is the first meaning of surrender to the higher self."

"He should never allow the actions or words of ignorant men to arouse in him reactions of anger, envy, or resentment."

"He should remember that there are two approaches to the Quest and both have to be used. There is the Long Path of self-improvement, self-purification, and self-effort; and there is the Short Path of forgetting the self entirely and directing his mind towards the Goal, towards the One Real Life, by constant remembrance of it and by practicing self-identification with it. If he uses the first approach, he can progress to a certain point. But by bringing in the second approach, the Higher Power is brought in too and comes to his help with Grace."

"He who can detach himself from emotion even while he continues to feel it, becomes its true master."

"He who enters upon this quest will have plenty to do, for he will have to work on the weaknesses in his character, to think impartially, to meditate regularly, and to aspire constantly. Above all, he will have to train himself in the discipline of surrendering the ego."

"He who possesses insight does not have to use arguments and reach conclusions. The truth is there, self-evident, inside himself as himself, for his inner being has become one with it."

"He who wishes to triumph must learn to endure."

"He will be all the better and not worse if he brings to his mystical path a scientific method of approach, a large historical acquaintance with the comparative mysticisms of many countries, a scientific knowledge of psychology, and a practical experience of the world. He will be all the better and not worse if he learns in advance, and in theory, what every step of the way into the holy of holies will be like."

"He will have gone far intellectually when he can understand the statement that mind is the seeker but Mind is the Sought."

"He will not be the first aspirant, nor the last, who continues to worship the ego under the delusion that he has begun to worship the Overself."