Friday, September 30, 2022

Ursula K. Le Guin

“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed.”



Thursday, September 29, 2022

Kahlil Gibran

 Your children are not your children. They're sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they're with you ,yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries With yesterday .



~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

 The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realise the Self. There is nothing else to do.



-Shiva Svarodaya

 The Shiva-Svarodaya (31, 35) declares: In the body exist many kinds of channels, which are very extensive. The sage must understand them in order to understand his own body. Running transversely, up, and down, they all exist in the body joined together like a wheel, dependent on the life force and linked to the breath of the body.



Hermann Hesse

 

“When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”


Ramdass

 So when you open yourself, there’s a line in the Tao that says, “Truth waits for the eye unclouded by longing.” As long as you want something you see only the outward container, and our desire to keep the game going makes it very hard for us to see what in fact is happening. And I really feel much more that my life is at play as a mystery. Rather than something where I know how it comes out. I mean, I find, “I don’t know” is the best response I have to most of the kinds of profound questions people ask me. It keeps me open right at the edge of something I don’t really understand, and yet I don’t have to.



Rumi

 "We are stars wrapped in skin. The light you are seeking has always been within."

 

Shvetashvatara Upanishad I.4-6

 

"The world is the wheel of God, turning round  And round with all living creatures upon its rim.  The world is the river of God,  Flowing from him and flowing back to him.  On this ever-revolving wheel of being  The individual self goes round and round  Through life after life, believing itself  To be a separate creature, until  It sees its identity with the Lord of Love    And attains immortality in the indivisible whole." 

                                               

Shozan Jack Haubner, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Enlightenment"

 Facing Yourself Spiritual change is precisely a process that is bigger than you. You don’t control it. You surrender to it. You don’t reinvent yourself through spiritual work. You face yourself, and then you must let go of all the ghastly things you find. But there is no end to these ghastly things. They keep coming. The ego is a bottomless pit of suckiness. And so you finally let go of the self that clings to itself (one definition of ego). True freedom comes when ego goes.



Khalil Gibran

 “The appearance of things changes according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.”



Paramananda, The Upanishads

 

“Who is better able to know God than I myself, since He resides in my heart and is the very essence of my being? Such should be the attitude of one who is seeking.” 


                                                                     

Hāfiz

 Everything, everything in existence

does point to God.


Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Sharon Salzberg

 Lovingkindness, aka Metta. is the priceless treasure that enlivens us and brings us into intimacy with ourselves and others. It is the force of love that will lead beyond fragmentation, loneliness and fear. The late Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba often said, "Don't throw anyone out of your heart." One of the most powerful healings (and greatest adventures) of our lifetime can come about as we learn to live by this dictum.


BG ~ 2.64 🧡

 "One who controls the mind, and is free from attachment and aversion, even while using the objects of the senses, attains the Grace of God."



Ramesh S Balsekar


“The sense of duality, which is a barrier to true love, must prevail so long as the apperception of Truth has not occurred. Once individuality is surrendered, there is only total Love.”


                                                                   


  

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

The power of the Dharma, Stephen Knapp


Generally speaking, many Hindus will respect all religions. They may be initiated by a Vedic guru, devoutly practice yoga, attend the temple regularly, yet still go to see some Christian preacher, or Buddhist teacher, or even hear an Islamic Imam talk about God. They may do this with the idea of attaining new insights, yet still not consider themselves falling away from their own path or converting to a different religion. Yet, if a Christian or Muslim would do such a thing as participate in an alternative religion, or even a different sect from which they belong, they may be considered sinful and apostates, or at least hypocrites and deserving of some punishment. But such narrow-mindedness hardly touches the person following the Vedic path.



Jon Kabat-Zinn

 Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more ..


 

-J. Krishnamurti

 Truth comes into being when your mind and heart are purged of all sense of striving and you are no longer trying to become somebody; it is there when the mind is very quiet, listening timelessly to everything that is happening.



Monday, September 26, 2022

Sri Yukteswar

 Forget the past. The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.

                                                 


 

The following quote, which teaches us about acquiring ‘spiritual eyes’ is taken from, The Revelation of Baha’u’llah, Vol. 2, p.31 by Adib Taherzadeh:


“Baha’u’llah teaches [quoting from] the Mathnavi [written by Rumi, the Sufi poet] that: ‘man will not be able to receive the Light of God in this day unless he acquires a new Eye. Eyes which are fixed on the things of this world can never see the glory of His Revelation, and ears which are tuned to the voices of the ungodly cannot hear the Melodies of the Kingdom.’ By ‘new eyes’ and ‘new ears’ He means spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. He states that since the Eye of the Spirit receives its Light from God it is shameful to let it turn to a stranger, and re-affirms that the purpose of God in creating the inner Eye was that man might behold the beauty of His Manifestation in this world.

                                                                     


Sunday, September 25, 2022

Saturday, September 24, 2022

Paramahansa Yogananda

 

"Do not take life's experiences too seriously. For in reality they are nothing but dream experiences. Play your part in life, but never forget that it is only a role."

Robert Adams

 Everyday remember what you are. Use whatever method suits you, meditation, inquiry, walks in nature, to stand outside the dream of being an identity trying to make do in a world. See that you are beyond anything the mind can conjure. There should be no such thing as not having the time to do this everyday. You have enough time to do all the foolish things you do. So take the time to do this also.


Ram Dass, Be Here Now

This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”


                                              


"Seasons of the Sacred" (pp. 7-10) By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

 "THE SACRED is a quality of the soul, our inner being and the inner being of the Earth. The experience of the sacred follows the rhythms of the soul and of the Earth, the cycles of becoming, the seasons of life. In today's world we are caught in an image of time as an endless flow of minutes, days and years that never return - a river of time that is always passing. We rarely think anymore of time as cyclical, of the days as a movement of light and dark, or the years as a pattern of returning seasons... We have also almost forgotten how the outer movement of time can reflect the time of the soul. Few still mark the year with... the prayers, rituals, or dances that belong to the sacred days...



Johann Von Goethe

 "Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution•"



Jack Kerouac



Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space.

Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.


                                                                          



Friday, September 23, 2022

By I Dunno

 Look around, no matter where you are and what you see, you are looking at Buddha nature, infinity, your true nature, Christ consciousness, nirvana, oneness, whatever we call it.

You have nowhere to go to get to it, it is timeless, it was always here and will always be here, in fact it cannot be escaped! But if you are not relating to it as such, it's because you are seeing it, relating to it and experiencing it as a seperate identity.

To experience Buddha nature and not just talk about it, "you" must disappear in it. And without "you" experiencing it, all that is left is Buddha-nature experiencing itself. But how can you disappear? see that everything appears and disappears in THIS, everyone and everything that you see, hear, smell, even your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideals, your desires, your dreams...

Notice especially that even your sense of being a person, your identity, your sense of being a separate observer is also something that appears and disappears in this infinite timeless space. Put your attention on the sense of observing, right now in this moment,

and realize that this sense of being someone, this sense of separation was never you or yours, it appears and disappears in this on its own like everything else All there is is THIS, everything else comes and goes, what are you trying to hold onto? Let it all go, everything, even yourself


                                        


Vishwas Chavan

 "Life in love with you

Is a poetry of the heart

Is a song of divinity, and

A cosmic dance."


Milarepa

 "He who avoids misunderstandings,

Amused at the play of his own mind, Is ever joyful."

Ramana Maharshi

 Why should you worry about the future? You don't even know the present properly. Take care of the present and the future will take care of itself.


Thursday, September 22, 2022

Unknown author

 “When you reach for the stars, you are reaching for the farthest thing out there.

When you reach deep into yourself, it is the same thing, but in the opposite direction.

If you reach in both directions, you will have spanned the universe.”


Robert Adams

 


Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” 🍁🍂


Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Frederick Lenz


“As the kundalini energy increases, as the energy of the psyche becomes more pronounced, which it does as thought becomes eclipsed by silence, all the variant mind states burn away. The mystical kundalini is an intense transformative energy which, when used, allows a person to make tremendous spiritual leaps in a short period of time. It is the essential energy of existence. It is the hidden ingredient in life. It is what makes it all work. ”


a Verse by Muruganar


When, the dense darkness of ignorance gone, The heart’s wide open firmament Is filled with peace serene, clear, bright, An inner fount of love uo springs Which is devotion true, the pure Auspiciousness of Shiva Himself



Yoga Vāsiṣṭha

 Just as the trees on the bank of a lake are reflected in the water, so also all these varied objects are reflected in the vast mirror of our consciousness ~ 


                                 


OM

 


Om (also spelled Aum) is a Hindu Sacred Sound that is considered the greatest of all Mantras. The syllable Om is composed of the three sounds a-u-m (in Sanskrit, the vowels a and u combine to become o) and the symbol’s threefold Nature is central to its meaning. It represent several important triads:

The Three Worlds - Earth, Atmosphere, and Heaven

The Three Major Hindu Gods - Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva

The Three Sacred Vedic Scriptures - Rg, Yajur, and Sama

Om Mystically embodies the Essence of the entire Universe. This meaning is further deepened by the Indian Philosophical belief that God first created Sound and the Universe arose from it. As the most Sacred Sound, Om is the Root of the Universe and everything that exists and it continues to hold everything together.