PLATO

 “Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”

Plato, The Republic

AJAHN CHAH

   Peace is within oneself to be found in the same place as agitation and suffering. It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering. Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it.

RALPH Waldo Emerson

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

 

Paul Brunton

The body, passions, and undesirable emotions must be perseveringly disciplined. Whilst ungoverned and running wild, they constitute the lower nature that is symbolized in so many myths as a dragon, lion, or serpent which has to be slain before the guardians of the divine gate permit entrance. Such purification is a necessary preliminary to and prerequisite of the higher training, which opens the individual mind to spiritual consciousness. 

Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world. Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940-1956

I cannot live with people for a long time. I need a little solitude, a portion of eternity.” Albert Camus

Gary Zukav

 The purpose of our journey on this precious Earth is now to align our personalities with our souls and the souls of others. It is to create harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life. It is to grow spiritually. This is our new evolutionary pathway. The old pathway - pursuing the ability to manipulate and control - no longer works.

Swami Chinmayananda

 

-Simone de Beauvoir, from ‘Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter’

 “I longed for apparitions, ecstasies; I yearned for something to happen inside or outside me [...]”

Herman Hesse Siddhartha

 Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future?

Ramana Maharshi

 

 “You create a dream-body for yourself in the dream and act with it. The same is falsified in the waking state. At present you think you are this body and not the dream-body. In your dream this body is falsified by the dream-body. So you see neither of these bodies is real. Because each of them is true for a time and false for other times. That which is real must be real always. The ‘I’-consciousness is present all through the three states. That alone is real. The three states are false. They are only for the mind It is the mind that obstructs your vision of your true nature, which is Infinite Spirit. (Consciousness)”