Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Spirit vibrated into matter; hence, both Spirit and matter exist. Matter, however, does not exist in the way that it appears to us. It exists as we see it owing to the delusive force of maya, which makes the indivisible Spirit seem finite and divisible to all appearances. Matter has existence in the same delusive way as does a mirage in the desert.
There is in India a story of a dying youth who, hearing the sobs of grief around him, cried: Insult me not with your cries of sympathy. When I soar to the land of eternal light and love; it is I who should feel for you. For me, disease, shattering of bones, sorrow, excruciating heartaches no more. I dream joy, I glide in joy, I breathe in joy evermore.
Our great whirling planet, our human individuality, were not given to us merely that we might exist for a time and then vanish into nothingness, but that we might question what it is all about. To live without understanding the purpose of life is foolish, a waste of time. The mystery of life surrounds us; we were given intelligence in order to solve it.
The material and the spiritual are but two parts of one universe and one truth. By overstressing one part or the other, man fails to achieve the balance necessary for harmonious development... Practice the art of living in this world without losing your inner peace of mind. Follow the path of balance to reach the inner wondrous garden of Self-Realization.
It takes a long time-many incarnations of right action, good company, help of the guru, self-awakening, wisdom, and meditation-for man to regain his soul consciousness of immortality. To reach this state of Self-realization, each man must practice meditation to transfer his consciousness from the limited body to the unlimited sphere of joy felt in meditation.
If you want to be loved, start loving others who need your love....If you want others to sympathize with you, start showing sympathy to those around you. If you want to be respected, you must learn to be respectful to everyone, both young and old....Whatever you want others to be, first be that yourself; then you will find others responding in like manner to you.
In vegetables and fruits, God has infused medicinal power to help in overcoming disease. Even these, however, have but a limited potency. The organs of the body are essentially sustained by the energy of God, and the person who employs various methods to increase this energy will have at his command a greater power for healing than is afforded by any medicine or diet.
Realize the tremendous spiritual power and beauty of the life of Christ, and try to live as he lived. Christ had no nationality. He loved all races as the children of God. Try to feel that brotherhood with all nationalities. Real brotherhood can never come unless we feel it in our hearts. Such feeling can be attained only through the actual contact of God in our hearts.
God is the life behind your life, the sight behind your eyes, the taste behind your tongue, and the love behind your love. To realize this to the fullest extent is Self-realization. Without God's power you can do nothing. If you always hold this thought, you cannot go wrong, because you will have purified the temple of your mind and your soul with the vibrations of God.
You must know the difference between imagination, theoretical knowledge and true realization. Could you nourish yourself by only listening to a talk on food? To know food only theoretically is to always remain hungry. You must eat to satisfy hunger. So he who seeks new doctrines continuously but does not put them into practice in his life is in continual spiritual starvation.
In the earlier days of history, kings and leaders went to the battlefield with their men; but today, those who determine that a nation will go to war remain safely behind. The next time leaders talk of warring, all the people should get together and send those leaders to the front lines. Give them a big arena with wonderfully effective ammunition, and the war will be finished in a day
To the last day of your life, be positive; try to be cheerful. Even at the very end, don't think, "I am finished." Instead of pitying yourself, you should be thinking, "O ye who are left on this desolate shore still to mourn and deplore, it is I who pity you." Death will not give you any trouble if you have a clear conscience; and if you go with this thought: "Lord, I am in Thy hands."
World' is a large term, but man must enlarge his allegiance, considering himself in the light of a world citizen... A person who truly feels: 'The world is my homeland; it is my America, my India, my Philippines, my England, my Africa,' will never lack scope for a useful and happy life. His natural local pride will know limitless expansion; he will be in touch with creative universal currents.
He who knows his soul knows this truth: " I am beyond everything finite; I I now see that the Spirit, alone in a space with Its ever-new joy, has expressed Itself as the vast body of nature. I am the stars, I am the waves, I am the Life of all, I am the laughter within all hearts, I am the smile on the faces of the flowers and in each soul. I am the Wisdom and Power that sustain all creation. "
Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them. You will want to change them when you realize that each thought creates according to its own nature. Remember that the law works at all times and that you are always demonstrating according to the kind of thoughts you habitually entertain. Therefore, start now to think only those thoughts that will bring you health and happiness.
God-realization is the most difficult state to reach. Let no one fool himself, nor think that someone else can "give" it to him. Whenever I fell into a state of mental stagnation, my Master could do nothing for me. But I never gave up trying to keep in tune with him by cheerfully performing whatever he asked me to do. "I have come to him for God-realization," I reasoned, "and I must listen to his advice."
This world is not the same to all people. Each one lives in his little domain....Peace and harmony may reign in one person's world; where strife and restlessness in anothers. But whatever the circumstances of one's environment, it consists of both an inner and an outer world. The outside world is the one in which your life engages in action and interaction. The world inside of you determines your happiness or unhappiness.
Lord Krishna... proclaims Self-realization, true wisdom, as the highest branch of all human knowledge-the king of all sciences, the very essence of dharma ("religion")-for it alone permanently uproots the cause of man's threefold suffering and reveals to him his true nature of Bliss. Self-realization is yoga or "oneness" with truth-the direct perception or experience of truth by the all-knowing intuitive faculty of the soul.
The way to liberation lies through this realization of the Self, by God-communion and by remaining in this God-aware state of the soul while performing dutiful actions. Any individual can reach this supreme actionless state by the renunciation of all fruits of actions: performing all dutiful acts without harbouring in his heart any likes and dislikes, possessing no material desires, and feeling God, not the ego, as the Doer of all actions.
At physical death man loses his consciousness of the flesh and becomes conscious of his astral body in the astral world. Thus physical death is astral birth. Later, he passes from the consciousness of luminous astral birth to the consciousness of dark astral death and awakens in a new physical body. Thus astral death is physical birth. These recurrent cycles of physical and astral encasements are the ineluctable destiny of all unenlightened men.
Consider whether fulfillment of the goal you have chosen will constitute success. What is success? If you possess health and wealth, but have trouble with everybody (including yourself), yours is not a successful life. Existence becomes futile if you cannot find happiness. When wealth is lost, you have lost a little; when health is lost, you have lost something of more consequence; but when peace of mind is lost, you have lost the highest treasure.
Let us meditate until we perceive the Infinite Christ reigning in our own hearts. Let us learn to love those who love us not; and to forgive those who do ill against us. Let us break all our mental boundaries of color, creed, and nationality, and receive all - even our inanimate and animal brothers - in the endless, all embracing arms of our Christ Consciousness. This will be a true and fitting celebration of the coming of Jesus Christ to this earth.
Death is not a blotting-out of existence, a final escape from life; nor is death the door to immortality. He who has fled his Self in earthly joys will not recapture It amidst the gossamer charms of an astral world. There he merely accumulates finer perceptions and more sensitive responses to the beautiful and the good, which are one. It is on the anvil of this gross earth that struggling man must hammer out the imperishable gold of spiritual identity.
The greatest dread of ordinary man is death, with its rude imposition interrupting fortuitous plans and fondest attachments with an unknown and unwelcome change. The yogi is a conqueror of the grief associated with death. By control of mind and life force and the development of wisdom, he makes friends with the change of consciousness called death-he becomes familiar with the state of inner calmness and aloofness from identification with the mortal body.
Take life as it comes and death as it comes. Death is really beautiful; if it were a bad thing, God would not let it happen to us. It is really freedom, an entry into another, higher life. We must utilize this life in order to realize the life beyond this one. Beyond this earth garden is the infinite land wherein we meet those whom we have thought lost. Although we must not seek death, when it comes we should know that it is the final examination for a great reward.
Why shouldn't you strengthen your own vibrations through fellowship with people seeking Self-realization, and by group meditation with them? This practice will fortify your own spiritual convictions you will find that many seemingly insuperable barriers in your life will crumble and dissolve in the waters of meditation. Your devotion and love for God will commingle with the devotion and love of others. Divine bliss will radiate from you, helping all persons you meet.
If death were the end, then there is no God, and there are no realised masters - it is all a pack of lies. The great ones wouldn't urge you to became better, for what would be the use if, good or bad, we are all junked at the end of life? What would be the value of the scriptures? There would be no justice whatsoever if this present existence is all there is to each individual life. What of those souls who lived only a few years, or lived in blind or crippled bodies?
The reflection, the verisimilitude, of life that shines in the fleshly cells from the soul source is the only cause of man's attachment to his body; obviously he would not pay solicitous homage to a clod of clay. A human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own.
Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. They don't know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.
When a man in the process of dreaming becomes conscious that he is dreaming, he is no longer identified with the phenomena; he is not affected exultantly or dolefully. God consciously dreams His cosmic play and is unaffected by it's dualities. A yogi who perceives his real self as separate from his active senses and their objects never becomes attached to anything. He is aware of the dream nature of the universe and watches it without being entangled in its complex but ephemeral nature.
It is not your passing thoughts or brilliant ideas so much as your plain everyday habits that control your life....Live simply. Don’t get caught in the machine of the world— it is too exacting. By the time you get what you are seeking your nerves are gone, the heart is damaged, and the bones are aching. Resolve to develop your spiritual powers more earnestly from now on. Learn the art of right living. If you have joy you have everything,so learn to be glad and contented....Have happiness now.
An adept of Kriya Yoga conquers death by taking the soul beyond identification with the physical body, consciously and at will; and then returning to the consciousness of the mortal form again. By this process, he experiences the body as merely the material dwelling place of the soul. He can remain therein as long as he wants; and after that body has fulfilled its usefulness, he can quit it at will without suffering physical pain or mental pain due to attachment, and enter his omnipresent home in God.
Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle.
Don't depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don't become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it.
Sri Yukteswar used to poke gentle fun at the commonly inadequate conceptions of renunciation."A beggar cannot renounce wealth," Master would say. "If a man laments: 'My business has failed; my wife has left me; I will renounce all and enter a monastery,' to what worldly sacrifice is he referring? He did not renounce wealth and love; they renounced him!"Saints like Gandhi, on the other hand, have made not only tangible material sacrifices, but also the more difficult renunciation of selfish motive and private goal, merging their inmost being in the stream of humanity as a whole.
The love of God uplifts and enlarges us. I can never think of myself anymore as exclusively in this body; I feel that I am present in all bodies. I have no awareness of race or other distinctions at all. In my perceptions, just as I feel my own consciousness in every part of my physical form, I feel you all to be a part of me. Everything that is living I feel within this body. I know the sensations of all. It is not imagination; it is Self-realization. This consciousness is far beyond telepathy. It is awareness of the perceptions of every being. That is the meaning of Christ Consciousness.