Genuine Communion
“When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately start revising what I just said. People don’t want me to always agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them like me. They feel; ‘I don’t want to exist to like you. I DON’T exist to like you.”
–Hugh Prather (American Writer, Minister, Spiritually-oriented Counselor and Writer in the Field of Personal Growth and Relationships, 1938-2010)
“Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person” (Hugh Prather)
Living For Others
This is one of the most reliable signs of a true Master:
“There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first. When you learn to live for others, they will live for you.”
–Paramahansa Yogananda (Indian Spiritual Teacher and, in 1920, Founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship, 1893-1952)
Learning to Let Go
“Meditation provides a way of learning how to let go. As we sit, the self we’ve been trying to construct and make a nice, neat package continues to unravel.”
–John Welwood (American Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Writer and Teacher on Psychospirituality, 1943-)
Freedom From Attachment
“Consciousness means freedom from attachment. You realize that the only thing you have to do it to keep yourself really straight, and then do whatever you do.”
–Ram Dass (a.k.a. Richard Alpert, American Spiritual Teacher, Author and Lecturer, 1931-)
To Love Is To Know and To Act
“When mystics use the word love, they use it very carefully, in the deeply spiritual sense, where to love is to know; to love is to act. If you really love, from the depths of your Consciousness, that love gives you a native wisdom. You perceive the needs of others intuitively and clearly, with detachment from any personal desires; and you know how to act creatively to meet those needs, dexterously surmounting any obstacle that comes in the way. Such is the immense, driving power of love.”
–Eknath Easwaran (Indian-American Spiritual Teacher, Professor and Author, 1910-1999)
Following the Facts
“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.”
–Thomas Henry Huxley (English Biologist and Educator, 1825-1895)
Surrendering Your Problems
“The surrender of every problem as it arises to the higher self, the renouncing of personal will in the matter, and the readiness to accept intuitive guidance as and when it comes provide a superior technique and yield better results than the old ways of intellectual handling and personal planning alone.”
–Paul Brunton (a.k.a. Raphael Hurst, English Philosopher, Traveler, Spiritual Teacher and Author, 1898-1981)
Empty Yourself and Let the Divine Come Through
“Unite yourself to the cosmos, and the thought of transcendence will disappear. Transcendence belongs to the profane world. When all trace of transcendence vanishes, the true person ‐ the Divine Being ‐ is manifest. Empty yourself and let the Divine function.”
–Morihei Ueshiba (Japanese Martial Artist and Founder of Aikido, 1883-1969)
If
This is one of those poems that a lot of us had to learn when I was a schoolboy. It was only years later that I realized that it is really very profound, and why Kipling had quite a reputation for his philosophy.
“IF”
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
but make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t dive way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream and not make dreams your master,
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same,
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
twisted by knaves to make a trap for fool,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools,
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss,
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after the are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
–Rudyard Kipling (Indian-born English Writer and, in 1907, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1865-1936)
Inner Communion
“There is a kind of inner communion with the psychic being which takes place when one willingly gives up desire, and because of this, one feels, a much greater joy than if he had satisfied his desire. Besides most usually, almost without exception, when one satisfies a desire it always leaves a kind of bitter taste some where.”
–The Mother of Pondicherry (a.k.a. Mirra Alfassa, French-born Indian Spiritual Teacher, 1878-1973)
