By Romesh Chunder Dutt

 "He is my self within the heart, smaller than a corn of rice smaller than a corn of barley, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than a canary seed or the kernel of a canary seed. He also is my self within the heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than heaven, greater than all these worlds."

 

While the Vedas look outward in reverence and awe of the phenomenal world, the Upanishads look inward, finding the powers of nature only an expression of the more awe-inspiring powers of human consciousness.

A. E. George Russell(1867 -1935)

"The Upanishads contain such godlike fullness of wisdom on all things that I feel the authors must have looked with calm remembrance back through a thousand passionate lives, full of feverish strife for and with shadows, ere they could have written with such certainty of things which the soul feels to be sure."

By Eknath Easwaran

 

The Upanishads tell us that there is a Reality underlying life which rituals cannot reach, next to which the things we see and touch in everyday life are shadows. They teach that this Reality is the essence of every created thing, and the same Reality is our real Self so that each of us is one with the power that created and sustains the universe. The Upanishads are not philosophy but are darshanas, “something seen” and therefore to be realized.

Mundaka Upanishad iii 2

 

 "As flowing rivers disappear into the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all."

By Nani Palkhivala

One of the lessons of the Upanishads is that you must regard "the universe as a thought in the mind of the Creator, thereby reducing all discussions of material creation to futility." The Upanishads teach that both space and time are endless or infinite. Modern science completely agrees.

Schuon, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom

 

The man who “loves God” is thus one who “dwells in the Inward” and “is oriented towards the Inward”; in other words, he remains motionless in his contemplative inwardness — or his “being”, if one prefers — while moving towards his infinite Center. Spiritual immobility is here opposed to the endless movement of external phenomena, while spiritual movement, on the contrary, is opposed to the natural inertia of the fallen soul, to the “hardness of heart” that must be cured by “grace” and “love”, whose remedy, that is to say, is everything which softens, transmutes, and transcends the ego.

Frithjof Schuon

 

Holiness is the sleep of the ego and the wake of the immortal soul — of the ego, fed on sensorial impressions and filled with desires, and of the soul, free and crystallized in God. The moving surface of our being must sleep and must therefore withdraw from images and instincts, whereas the depths of our being must be awake in the consciousness of the Divine, thus lighting up, like a motionless flame, the silence of the holy sleep.

STATIONS OF WISDOM

In fact, what separates man from divine Reality is but a thin partition: God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God. This partition, for man, is a mountain; man stands before a mountain which he must remove with his own hands. He digs away the earth, but in vain, the mountain remains; man however goes on digging, in the name of God. And the mountain vanishes. It was never there.

Khalil Gibran

 

“In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;

And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.

Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.”

Varieties of Religious Experience

  William James defines Illumination, or mystical experience, as a spiritual event that is passive (cannot be sought but rather occurs to the individual), noetic (incomprehensible through the faculty of reason), transient (impermanent or even fleeting), and ineffable