Eknath Easwaran, Meditation, Part 2

The discovery that you are not the body has far-reaching consequences. For one thing, you no longer see black or brown or white people, but people with all kinds of beautifully colored jackets. You no longer identify people with their color - or their age or sex or hairstyle or any other peripheral matter like money or status. You begin to awaken to the central truth of life, that all of us are one. Then, too, you develop the capacity to see clearly the body's needs and how to provide for them wisely. You will not be taken in, for example, by just the taste of food, or by its color, or texture, or the sound it makes . . . or the sound the advertiser makes on its behalf. If the senses set up a clamor for junk food you can say affectionately, "Sorry, friends, that's not fit for you." The senses may be disappointed at first, of course, but your body will be grateful: "He really takes good care of me!" Please do not think this means you lose your appreciation of food. Actually, it will increase. When you can change your eating habits at will, you not only enjoy wholesome food, you have the satisfaction of taking good care of your body. All the other things we charitably call food will leave you unsatisfied.

Swami Vivekananda

Feel nothing, know nothing, do nothing, have nothing, give up all to God, and say utterly, 'Thy will be done.' We only dream this bondage. Wake up and let it go.

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's

Milarepa of Tibet

"I have understood this body of mine to be the product of ignorance, composed of flesh and blood and lit up by the perceptive power of consciousness. To those fortunate ones who long for emancipation it may be the great vessel by which they may procure Freedom. But to the unfortunates who only sin, it may be the guide to lower and miserable states of existence. This our life is the boundary mark whence one may take an upward or downward path. Our present time is a most precious time, wherein each of us must decide, in one way or other, for lasting good or lasting ill."

Huston Smith, The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions

“Never during its pilgrimage is the human spirit completely adrift and alone. From start to finish its nucleus is the Atman, the god-within... underlying its whirlpool of transient feelings, emotions, and delusions is the self-luminous, abiding point of the transpersonal god. As the sun lights the world even when cloud-covered, “the Immutable is never seen but is the Witness; it is never heard but is the Hearer; it is never thought but is the Thinker; it is never known but is the Knower. There is no other witness but This, no other knower but This." from the Upanishad”

Adi Shankara

Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognize your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

Ramana Maharshi

Leave it to God. Surrender unreservedly. Either surrender because you admit your inability and require a higher power to help you, or investigate the cause of misery by going to the source and merging into the Self. Either way you will be free.

Don Miguel Ruiz

You are Life passing through your body, passing through your mind, passing through your soul. Once you find that out, not with logic, not with the intellect, but because you can feel that Life, you find out that you are the force that makes the flowers open and close, that makes the hummingbird fly from flower to flower. You find out that you are in every tree, and you are in every animal, vegetable, and rock. You are that force that moves the wind and breathes through your body. The whole universe is a living being that is moved by that force, and that is what you are. You are Life.

Annamalai swami

 

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.”