Home | Community | Message Board

MagicBag Grow Bags
This site includes paid links. Please support our sponsors.


Welcome to the Shroomery Message Board! You are experiencing a small sample of what the site has to offer. Please login or register to post messages and view our exclusive members-only content. You'll gain access to additional forums, file attachments, board customizations, encrypted private messages, and much more!

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale   Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Extract   North Spore Bulk Substrate   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order

Jump to first unread post Pages: < First | < Back | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | 107 | 108 | 109 | Next > | Last >
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #27962655 - 09/22/22 03:00 PM (1 year, 4 months ago)

Linji Yixuán;
"If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the sea of delusion."


Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"As globalization and globalized materialism spreads throughout the world, so there's auto immune disease spreading throughout the world in societies that hardly even knew them before. Diseases, whether mental or physical, are normal responses to abnormal circumstances, and what would be considered normal in this society is often actually insane."


Alan Watts - on Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life - On Pain;
"Well, it’s rather the same with death. Because death is, after all, beneficent. If we never died, not only would our world become hopelessly overpopulated, not only might we become utterly bored with century after century after century of experience without intermission, we might crave death after the first five hundred years of life, and never to be able to have it would be like the torture of a chronic and fantastic insomnia. So if death is fundamentally merciful, if it is natural, if it is something that is just as much an integral part of being a human being as having a head or having hands, then would it not be possible to have a changed attitude to death in any community or society, so that in due course people could begin to look upon the pain attending death in the same way as they can be taught to look upon the pain attending birth?

Now, there’s another aspect to the problem, and that is that a great deal of our negative attitude to the experience of pain—and acute physical pain I’m speaking of now—is connected with a certain culturally conditioned unwillingness to react to pain in a natural way. In other words, we are afraid of giving in to suffering in the way that our own physical organism suggests to us. We’re afraid of crying, we’re afraid of screaming, we’re afraid of going into those very undignified motions which constitute the human being’s reaction in pain—even though, as I just pointed out, we sometimes have the very same reactions in acute pleasure. But we are fundamentally ashamed of pain because we are taught that giving in to pain—weeping or something like that—is unmanly, sissy, or something like that.

Now, it’s a very dangerous doctrine that a human being should always be rigid in conditions of suffering. I often like to quote a passage from that Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu which says:

Man at his birth is supple and tender,
In death he is rigid and hard.
Plants, when they are young, are pliant and soft,
But when dead they are brittle and dry.
Thus tenderness and softness are the companions of life,
But rigidity and hardness are the companions of death.

In other words, there is strength in weakness. Consider a cat: when a cat drops off a tree, what does the cat do? Does it go rigid? Does it say, “I’m going to be a real tough guy and meet the ground without flinching”? Does the cat stick out its feet like this? No. Because if it did, when it hit the ground it’d be just a broken bag of bones. When a cat’s in midair, it relaxes. It goes with it. It becomes weak. And so it hits the ground with a soft, heavy thud and is unharmed.

Think, also, of water. Water was one of the basic symbols of Lao Tzu’s philosophy: to be like water. Nothing in the world is softer and more yielding than water. And yet, at the same time, nothing is like water for overcoming and wearing away things which are hard, like rocks. And thus, if you put a knife into water and you try to cut it, what happens? The water gives completely to the knife. The water closes up wherever the knife went. And although you strike at it as hard as you like, you can never create a wound. So it is, you see, because of its softness that the water triumphs over the hardness of the knife.

So then, it’s the same with human beings. Unfortunately, we are so brought up to mistrust our natural feeling reactions to certain experiences. We are conditioned to believe that we will suffer less, that we will somehow triumph over pain, if we hold our feelings rigid. But, you know, our reactions to pain are in a way therapeutic. They’re healing, just like fever. When we have poisons in our blood, the natural defense mechanisms of the body send up our temperature, and in this way boil out the invading bugs. Now, it used to be thought that when people had fevers, this was the disease; the fever itself was the disease. And so, once upon a time, doctors used to give medicine to take away the fever. But by taking away the fever, they very often killed the patient because they took away the defensive action of the body to drive out the disease.

And so, in just the same way, if one refuses to react in the way of nature to invasions of pain, so too one may shatter the body beyond what it can stand. It’s the same thing. You know, no bridge will stand up unless it has give. If a steel suspension bridge is built so firmly that it doesn’t sway in the wind, that bridge will come crashing down on the first gale. It’s just because there’s give in it that the bridge is strong. Take a great building like the Empire State: the Empire State also has a sway in it. And if it didn’t have that sway, it would be a very insecure structure indeed.

So then, when we are willing to react to pain as our own natural feeling suggests—if we’re willing to scream, if we’re willing to weep, if we’re willing to wriggle and writhe as pain suggests to us to do—a very strange thing happens. The very willingness to react in that way often makes it quite unnecessary to do so. Now, you may say I’m just talking big. And the only way I can prove what I say is: the next time you have a toothache, the next time you have any serious pain, see what happens if you do this; if you, as it were, go along with the pain and don’t try to fight it. Yield, become weak, and you will discover the strength of weakness.

So then, you see, this is not really an escapist philosophy at all. It is most definitely a philosophy of keeping in mind the actual reality of the situation in which you find yourself. I don’t know what could be more realistic than this, what could be more fundamentally facing the hard facts of life. One keeps his attention on the actual concrete fact that is happening, as distinct from our socially conditioned and inculcated ideas and attitudes about it. And this is really facing reality a hundred percent.

And so there come out of this two basic results. The first is that, when we don’t resist pain, we don’t set up a vicious circle in connection with it. Take the pain of fear again: supposing you’re in a situation where the doctor has told you you have to have an operation. And, of course, if you’re going to undergo this operation in the best way, you need to be rested, you need to have plenty of sleep, you need to be strong, and so on. Well, fine advice isn’t it? Because the moment you know you’ve got to have an operation you’re liable to get a bit frightened, and then you know you ought not to be frightened, you ought not to stay awake nights and worry about it. You need sleep! And then you get afraid, you see, because you’re afraid. You’re afraid that your fear is going to lead to insomnia and debility, and so you’re afraid of being afraid. And then, because you see that you are afraid of being afraid, you are afraid you are afraid because you are afraid. So that worry is always a vicious circle in which you are worrying because you worry because you worry because you worry. And this, as it were, builds up a whole chain of reactions which makes the pain of fear worse and worse and worse.

So then, if at any point in this link we can, as it were, be willing to be worried, and then you don’t worry about being worried. Be willing to be afraid, then you don’t have to be afraid of being afraid. And so this, in other words, diminishes the total amount of pain, because it doesn’t allow the painful situation to build itself up and up and up and up. In the same way, if somebody stuck a hook into you, and you pull away from it, well, the hook goes more deeply into you. But if you’re caught like a fish on a hook and you go with the hook, this reduces the amount of tension. And this works backwards all the way down the line.

Now, there’s also a second result, and that is that when our mind, our consciousness, our attention, is fully focused on what is, on the actual situation—as I said, we are free from various thoughts about it and associations with it that bring up a context which makes the experience painful. So you might say that this is an attitude of taking things as they come one at a time. For example, many of you who are not blessed with dishwashers have to wash many dishes day after day. And when you’ve been married as a woman for, oh, ten or eleven years, one day you’re sitting there at the sink, utterly weary of the whole thing. And in your mind’s eye comes the immense pile of dishes which you’ve had to wash day after day in the past. There they are in your mind’s eye, standing up, pile for ever and ever on the draining board. And also in your mind’s eye is that enormous pile of dishes that you’re going to have to wash in the future. And you think, “My life is out of a mere drudge! Washing dishes, washing dishes, washing dishes, and there’s no end to it!”

But if you were realistic you would see this: you have only one dish to wash in your life—this one. You can only wash one dish at a time, and that’s the only one you have to deal with. It’s the same with climbing a mountain. IF you start to think, as you climb, “Oh, what a lot of steps to take!” Then the task becomes utterly oppressive. Or if, for example, you make a new year’s resolution and you say, “Well, I’m going to go on the wagon. I’m not going to drink anymore this new year.” And if you say, “This whole year I will not touch another drop of drink,” well, of course, the old devil immediately brings to your mind 365 days of not drinking anything—anything alcoholic—and that’s overwhelming. Don’t tempt the devil that way! Once conquers the problem by not drinking this one, and saying nothing about the next. So with the climbing of the mountain: taking each step as if it were the only step to be taken.

And so in this situation, then, where there is the experience of agony—whether it be physical or whether it be moral—the way out is, in a way, suffering that agony as if this were the only thing in the whole world to be done. By going right down to the bottom of the furnace, no further pains will harass you. It was also so—isn’t it?—in Dante’s Divine Comedy, when Dante and Virgil find their way out of hell by going down to the very center of hell.

I like to illustrate this with another of those Zen stories. There was a monk who got news that his mother had died, and he was weeping. And another Buddhist monk said to him, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! You, a monk, still showing worldly attachments by weeping!” He said, “Don’t be silly, I’m weeping because I want to weep!”"


Bhagavad Gita;
"Still your mind in me, still yourself in me, and without a doubt you shall be united with me, Lord of Love, dwelling in your heart."


Red Pine - The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma - Breakthrough Sermon;
"When a great bodhisattva delves deeply into perfect wisdom, he realizes that the four elements and five shades are devoid of a personal self. And he realizes that the activity of his mind has two aspects: pure and impure. By their very nature, these two mental states are always present. They alternate as cause or effect depending on conditions, the pure mind delighting in good deeds, the impure mind thinking of evil.

Those who are not affected by impurity are sages. They transcend suffering and experience the bliss of nirvana. All others, trapped by the impure mind and entangled by their own karma, are mortals. They drift through the three realms and suffer countless afflictions. And all because this impure mind obscures their real self.

The Sutra of the Ten Stages says, “In the body of mortals is the indestructible buddha-nature. Like the sun, its light fills endless space. But once veiled by the dark clouds of the five shades, it's like a light inside a jar hidden from view.” And the Nirvana Sutra says, all mortals have the buddha-nature. But it is covered by darkness from which they can not escape. Our buddha-nature is awareness: to be aware and to make others aware. To realize awareness is liberation.” Everything good has awareness for its root. From this root of awareness grows the tree of all virtues and the fruit of nirvana. Beholding the mind like this is understanding.

The mind is the source of all virtues. And this mind is the chief of all powers. The eternal bliss of nirvana comes from the mind at rest. Rebirth in the three realms also comes from the mind. The mind is the door to every world. And the mind is the ford to the other shore.

Those who know where the door is do not worry about reaching it. Those who know where the ford is don't worry about crossing it. The people I meet nowadays are superficial. They think of merit as something that has form. They foolishly concern themselves with erecting statues and stupas, telling people to pile up lumber and bricks, to paint this blue and that green. They strain body and mind, injure themselves and mislead others. How will they ever become enlightened? They see something tangible and instantly become attached. If you talk to them about formlessness, they sit there dumb and confused. Such disciples wear themselves out in vain.

If you can simply concentrate your mind's inner light and behold its outer illumination, you'll dispel the three poisons and drive away the six thieves once and for all. And without effort you will gain possession of an infinite number of virtues, perfections and doors to the truth. Seeing through the mundane and witnessing the sublime is less than an eye-blink away. Realization is now. Why worry about gray hair? The true door is hidden and can't be revealed. I have only touched upon beholding the mind."


Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"GM: Are we free? Are we conscious? Are we making a decision based on full awareness or are we driven by unconscious dynamics that we've inherited or that we developed as a response to childhood trauma? Well, insofar as we're not conscious, we are not free. We have then a social structure that induces trauma in a lot of people, therefore it induces escapist, addictive behaviors in a lot of people, and those inner trends line up with how society looks like on the outside. So therefore all this looks perfectly normal and perfectly natural. Fundamentally the messages is that with our minds we create the world. So if I have a worldview that the world is a horrible place, then I'm going to live in a world where I have to be aggressive, suspicious, competitive and make myself as big as possible so I don't get eaten up. So I have to be grandiose and cunning because that's the world I'm living in. And these are the people that our society rewards with power.

RB: Do you think that the inability of these individuals to manifest real change is a demonstration that what we have are deeply entrenched and traumatized systems that are predicated on unconscious choices, unconscious drives and that the system cannot and will not alter itself from within itself, but will sustain itself, and it's only sort of new, radical ideas that can alter it?

GM: That's exactly what I'm saying. Large segments of the economy survive because people buy things that give them temporary pleasure but do them no good whatsoever in the long-term, in fact are even harmful. I mean, we're going so far as to destroy the earth because of our addiction. The disconnect from the body of the earth really has to do with the disconnect from our own bodies. The two are together. And the exploitation of the earth as if it was something separate from us has a lot to do with patriarchal domination. I mean, we talk about mother earth. Look what we're doing to mother. It's a mother hatred almost. It speaks to a blindness and a passivity which itself is a marker of societal and collective trauma. Our schools are full of kids with learning difficulties, mental health issues that are trauma-based, but the average teacher never gets single lecture on trauma. They're fundamentally working with an essential lack of information."


Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj;
"Wisdom is knowing I am nothing,
Love is knowing I am everything,
and between the two my life moves."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #27962670 - 09/22/22 03:10 PM (1 year, 4 months ago)

Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"So there was a ceremony here led by a Peruvian shaman and within half an hour of having ingested the brew, it felt very much real, it felt very much like me, but it was new because I experienced a state of, um, such deep love and gratitude such as I have not recalled experiencing before. And I saw that my own addictive behaviors  were driven precisely because I hadn't been able to experience that kind of love and that kind of gratitude. From that state, there's no need to look for anything else outside of yourself. And I also learned very shortly that the ayahuasca has the power to teach people about their trauma, to actually show them what happened to them. All of a sudden, oh yes, this is what happened. This is why I decided that life is unbearable. This is why I decided that I wasn't lovable. This is why I decided that I had to soothe myself from the outside because there was no peace inside, and immediately I sat down and I worked with this."


Gautama Buddha - Digha Nikaya 2: Samaññaphala Sutta: The Fruits of the Contemplative Life;
"Recollection of Past Lives

“With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to knowledge of the recollection of past lives [lit: previous homes]. He recollects his manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two births, three births, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand, one hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction & expansion, (recollecting,) ‘There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.’ Thus he recollects his manifold past lives in their modes & details. Just as if a man were to go from his home village to another village, and then from that village to yet another village, and then from that village back to his home village. The thought would occur to him, ‘I went from my home village to that village over there. There I stood in such a way, sat in such a way, talked in such a way, and remained silent in such a way. From that village I went to that village over there, and there I stood in such a way, sat in such a way, talked in such a way, and remained silent in such a way. From that village I came back home.’ In the same way—with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability—the monk directs and inclines it to knowledge of the recollection of past lives. He recollects his manifold past lives… in their modes & details. This, too, great king, is a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here & now, more excellent than the previous ones and more sublime.

The Passing Away & Re-appearance of Beings

“With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to knowledge of the passing away and re-appearance of beings. He sees—by means of the divine eye, purified and surpassing the human—beings passing away and re-appearing, and he discerns how they are inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate in accordance with their kamma: ‘These beings—who were endowed with bad conduct of body, speech, and mind, who reviled the noble ones, held wrong views and undertook actions under the influence of wrong views—with the break-up of the body, after death, have re-appeared in a plane of deprivation, a bad destination, a lower realm, hell. But these beings—who were endowed with good conduct of body, speech, and mind, who did not revile the noble ones, who held right views and undertook actions under the influence of right views—with the break-up of the body, after death, have re-appeared in a good destination, a heavenly world.’ Thus—by means of the divine eye, purified and surpassing the human—he sees beings passing away and re-appearing, and he discerns how they are inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate in accordance with their kamma. Just as if there were a tall building in the central square (of a town), and a man with good eyesight standing on top of it were to see people entering a house, leaving it, walking along the street, and sitting in the central square. The thought would occur to him, ‘These people are entering a house, leaving it, walking along the streets, and sitting in the central square.’ In the same way—with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability—the monk directs and inclines it to knowledge of the passing away and re-appearance of beings. He sees—by means of the divine eye, purified and surpassing the human—beings passing away and re-appearing, and he discerns how they are inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate in accordance with their kamma.… This, too, great king, is a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here & now, more excellent than the previous ones and more sublime.

The Ending of Effluents

“With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of effluents.4 He discerns, as it has come to be, that ‘This is stress… This is the origination of stress… This is the cessation of stress… This is the way leading to the cessation of stress… These are effluents… This is the origination of effluents… This is the cessation of effluents… This is the way leading to the cessation of effluents.’ His heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, is released from the effluent of sensuality, the effluent of becoming, the effluent of ignorance. With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’ Just as if there were a pool of water in a mountain glen—clear, limpid, & unsullied—where a man with good eyesight standing on the bank could see shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also shoals of fish swimming about and resting, and it would occur to him, ‘This pool of water is clear, limpid, and unsullied. Here are these shells, gravel, and pebbles, and also these shoals of fish swimming about and resting.’ In the same way—with his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability—the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of effluents. He discerns, as it has come to be, that ‘This is stress… This is the origination of stress… This is the cessation of stress… This is the way leading to the cessation of stress… These are effluents… This is the origination of effluents… This is the cessation of effluents… This is the way leading to the cessation of effluents.’ His heart, thus knowing, thus seeing, is released from the effluent of sensuality, the effluent of becoming, the effluent of ignorance. With release, there is the knowledge, ‘Released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.’ This, too, great king, is a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here & now, more excellent than the previous ones and more sublime. And as for another visible fruit of the contemplative life, higher and more sublime than this, there is none.”


Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"I developed a method of therapy or explorationwith people called compassionate inquiry. The essence of which is the belief that the truth is inside all of us, we just have to ask the right questions to help people arrive at the truth."


Alan Watts - The Essential Lectures - Clothing;
"Our clothing—as I said at the beginning in exhibiting the business suit—is undertaker clothing, ministerial clothing, military clothing. For all those things which—in our culture—we cultivate an uptight attitude. UNGH! Hold yourself in! Restrain yourself! UNGH! Like this. But in doing this, you see, we are constantly at ware with ourselves. It is as if you were moving your arm, and you wanted to move your arm very strongly in one way. Alright, you go like that. You immediately tighten the bicep. And that would be the natural thing to do. In lifting something heavy you immediately tighten the bicep, and up it comes. But supposing you tighten the tricep at the same time, which is the muscle here at the back. Then you get this… You’re fighting with yourself, you see? And although this movement may look oooh, very tough and strong, it isn’t at all! Because you’re fighting with yourself while you do it.

Now, in this way—all the time—we have been taught to fight with ourselves because our personalities have been split. Our culture tells us that we are, on the one hand, a nasty little animal that has to be controlled and beaten into submission, and that, on the other hand, we’re a rational soul, which is the sort of higher self which is supposed to take control of the lower self. And for this reason we’re always at cross-purposes with ourselves.

Freud, for example, distinguished between the pleasure principle (which he located in the genital region) and the reality principle (which he located in the cortical region, in the brain). So there’s a distance between these two centers. This is the pleasure center, this is the intelligence center. And because they’re not in the same place, for some reason or other, it seems there always has to be a fight between them.

In a plant, like a flower, its mind and its sex organ is the same place, and so it doesn’t have that conflict. But in a human being they’re divided. We think they’re divided, at least. Simply because they are at a distance from each other in space. But they’re not really divided at all. They look different; the head looks very different from the genitals. But, in the same way, bees look very different from flowers.

One flies freely in the air and buzzes, and the other is rooted to the ground and colorfully perfumes the environment so the bee is attracted to it. But the thing is that these two very different looking things are, in fact, one single organism. Because if there are no bees there are no flowers, and if there are no flowers there are no bees. They come together; as the Chinese have a phrase: to arise mutually. So, in the same way, when you were born your head and your feet, your head and your genitals, arose mutually. They came in together. They’re not really separate from each other.

And therefore, this idea that discipline, that living an ordered life consists in controlling yourself—that is to say, by having one self that needs to be controlled and another part of yourself which is the controlling one is nothing but creating a conflict and a disturbance inside yourself. You have to get with yourself in order to control yourself. In other words, if I want to open my hand it opens, like that. I don’t know how it does it, but it just does it like that. But if it were necessary for me to open my hand to do this—you see?—and then, when I had to pick up something like, well, here’s a cigar, and I need to pick it up with my right hand so I have to do this… I mean, wouldn’t that be absurd? But that’s what we’re doing all the time when we divide ourselves into two parts: the spiritual and the material; the angelic and rational, and the animal or irrational.

And so, constantly, we’re holding clubs over ourselves. And that is one of the reasons, therefore, why, when you get up in the morning and you put on your bathrobe and you feel at ease that, after a while, you begin to feel guilty. Because you feel you should be—as we say—dressed and in your right mind so that you can go out and be a person of action; you can go to the office and feel that… there it is.

Now, another thing which makes the philosopher comment in connection with clothing is commuting. Every day in the urban areas millions of people are absolutely wearing themselves out, tearing their nerves to distraction by going along the freeways—in a car, fouling the atmosphere—to do their work. And their work, you see, is completely divorced, something quite separate from their play. Now, this is one of the great insanities of our civilization. Every sensible person should get paid for playing. If you don’t get paid for playing, something’s wrong with you. You haven’t learned the art of life. And, furthermore, in most kinds of business—especially clerical forms of business where you need an office for paperwork and so on—you don’t need an office if you’ve got a telephone. The telephone company can show you how to do anything in the world you want to do—by way of business—by way of phone, so that you can cut down the enormous amount of time wasted in rushing around commuting. You can stay at home and do your work from there. But we have got this idea that work is one thing and play is another, therefore we have work clothes—and the business suit is not a practical form of work clothes—and we have play clothes. And I suggest—and we will develop this in future talks—that one of the most important things is to get our heads together with our genitals, our genitals together with our heads, and our work together with our play, and make our life unified and one.""


Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"GM: So let's notice something. A, you, I should say we, 'cause we're all like this, we don't respond to what happens. We respond to our perception of what happens.

TF: Right.

GM: Okay. That's what the Buddha said. It's with our minds we create the world."


J. Krishnamurti - San Diego 1974 - Conversation 8 - Does pleasure bring happiness?;
"K: Talking of monkeys, sir, I was in Benares at the place I go to usually, I was doing yoga, exercises, half naked, and a big monkey, with black face and long tail, came and sat on the veranda. I closed my eyes. I looked and there was this big monkey. She looked at me and I looked at her. A big monkey, sir. They are powerful things. And it stretched out its hand, so I walked up and held her hand, like that, held it.

A: Held it.

K: And it was rough but very, very supple, extraordinarily supple. But rough. And we looked at each other. And it said it wanted to come into the room. I said, look, I am doing exercises, I have little time, would you come another day. I kind of talked to it. Come another day. So it looked at me and I withdrew, went back. She stayed there for two or three minutes and gradually went away.

A: Marvellous, just marvellous. Complete act of attention between you.

K: There was no sense of fear. It wasn't afraid. I wasn't afraid. A sense of, you know...

A: This reminds me of a story I read about Ramana Maharishi, how when he was a young man he went and lived in a tiger's cave. And it was occupied by the tiger. And the tiger would come back after the hunt in the early hours of the morning and sleep with him. To read that within the environs of our culture well it starts, well you feel undone when you read that if you think for a moment you could allow yourself to believe it. But in the context of what we have been saying about the monkeys, and this marvellous story you told me, I wish I could have shaken the hand of that little mother with her baby. I wasn't ready to.

K: No, it was really - I don't know, there must have been a communication, there must have been a sense of friendship, you know, without any antagonism, without any fear of it. It looked at me, you know. And I think attention is something not to be practised, not to be cultivated, go to a school to learn how to be attentive. That's what they do in, in this country and in other places, say, I don't know what attention is, I'm going to learn from somebody who will tell me how to get it. Then it's not attention.

A: Speed reading, it's called.

K: Speed reading, yes.

A: A thousand words a minute.

K: Sir, that's why I see there is a great sense of care and affection in being attentive, which means diligently watching. That word 'diligent' comes from 'legere', you know, of course, to read. To read exactly what it is, what is there. Not interpret, not translate it, not contrive to do something with it, but to read what is there. There is an infinite lot to see. There is tremendous lot to see in pleasure, as we said. And to read it. And to read it, you must be watchful, attentive, diligent - care. We are negligent."


Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"As we heal, that same energy is liberated for life and for being in the present. So the energy of trauma can be transformed into the energy of life."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #27970155 - 09/27/22 04:13 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Ramakrishna;
"Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing."


Goodie Mob - Fighting;
"As individuals and as a people we are at war
But the majority of my side got they eyes open wide
But still don't recognize what we fighting fo
I guess that's what I'm writing for to try to shed some light
But we been in the darkness for so long, don't know right from wrong
Y'all scared to come near it, you ignore the voice
In your head when you hear it
The enemy is after yo' spirit but you think it's all in yo' mind
You'll find a lot of the reason we behind
Is because the system is designed to keep our third eyes blind
But not blind in the sense that our other two eyes can't see
You just end investing quality time in places you don't even need to be
We don't even know who we are, but the answer ain't far
Matter of fact its right up under our nose
But the system taught us to keep that book closed
See the reason why he gotta lie and deceive is so
That we won't act accordingly
To get the blessings we suppose to receive
Yeah it's true, Uncle Sam wants you to be a devil too
See, he's jealous because his skin is a curse but what's worse
Is if I put it in a verse y'all listen to some bullshit first
We ain't natural born killas, we are a spiritual people
God's chosen few
Think about the slave trade when they had boats with
Thousands of us on board
And we still was praising the Lord now you ready to die
Over a coat, a necklace round your throat, that's bullshit
Black people ya'll better realize, we losin', you better god damn fight and die
If you got to get yo' spirit and mind back and we got to do it together
Goodie Mob means, "The Good Die Mostly Over Bullshit"
You take away one "O" and it will let you know
"God is Every Man of Blackness"
The Lord has spoken thru me and the G-Mo-B!"


Nikola Tesla;
"All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle."


J. Krishnamurti - San Diego 1974 - Conversation 11 - Being hurt and hurting others;
"A: Mr Krishnamurti, during our conversations one thing has emerged for me with, I'd say, an arresting force. That is, on the one hand we have been talking about thought and knowledge in terms of a dysfunctional relationship to it, but never once have you said that we should get rid of thought, and you have never said that knowledge, as such, in itself, has something profoundly the matter with it. Therefore the relationship between intelligence and thought arises, and the question of what seems to be that which maintains a creative relationship between intelligence and thought - perhaps some primordial activity which abides. And in thinking on this I wondered whether you would agree that perhaps in the history of human existence the concept of god has been generated out of a relationship to this abiding activity, which concept has been very badly abused. And it raises the whole question of the phenomenon of religion itself. I wondered if we might discuss that today?

K: Yes, sir. You know, a word like religion, love, or god, has almost lost all its meaning. They have abused these words so enormously, and religion has become a vast superstition, a great propaganda, incredible beliefs and superstitions, worship of images made by the hand or by the mind. So when we talk about religion I would like, if I may, to be quite clear that we are both of us using the word 'religion' in the real sense of that word, not either in the Christian, or the Hindu, or the Muslim, or the Buddhist, or all the stupid things that are going on in this country in the name of religion.

I think the word 'religion' means gathering together all energy, at all levels, physical, moral, spiritual, at all levels, gathering all this energy which will bring about a great attention. And in that attention there is no frontier, and then from there move. To me that is the meaning of that word: the gathering of total energy to understand what thought cannot possibly capture. Thought is never new, never free, and therefore it is always conditioned and fragmentary, and so on, which we discussed. So religion is not a thing put together by thought, or by fear, or by the pursuit of satisfaction and pleasure, but something totally beyond all this, which isn't romanticism, speculative belief, or sentimentality. And I think if we could keep to that, to the meaning of that word, putting aside all the superstitious nonsense that is going on in the world in the name of religion, which has become really quite a circus, however beautiful it is. Then I think we could from there start, if you will. If you agree to the meaning of that word.

A: Yes. I have been thinking as you have been speaking that in the biblical tradition there are actual statements from the prophets which seem to point to what you are saying. Such things come to mind as Isaiah's, taking the part of the divine, when he says, 'My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways, as high as the heavens are above the earth so are my thoughts and your thoughts, so stop thinking about me in that sense'.

K: Yes, quite.

A: And don't try to find a means to me that you have contrived since my ways are higher than your ways. And then I was thinking while you were speaking concerning this act of attention, this gathering together of all energies of the whole man; the very simple, 'Be still and know that I am God'. Be still. It's amazing when one thinks of the history of religion, how little attention has been paid to that as compared with ritual.

K: But I think when we lost touch with nature, with the universe, with the clouds, lakes, birds, when we lost touch with all that, then the priests came in. Then all the superstition, fears, exploitation, all that began. The priest became the mediator between the human and the so-called divine. And I believe, if you have read the Rig Veda - I was told about it because I don't read all this - that there, in the first Veda there is no mention of God at all. There is only this worship of something immense, expressed in nature, in the earth, in the clouds, in the trees, in the beauty of vision. But that being, very, very simple, the priests said, that is too simple.

A: (laughs) Let's mix it up.

K: Let's mix it up, let's confuse it a little bit. And then it began. I believe this is traceable from the ancient Vedas to the present time, where the priest became the interpreter, the mediator, the explainer, the exploiter; the man who said, this is right, this is wrong, you must believe this or you will go to perdition, and so on and so on and so on. He generated fear, not the adoration of beauty, not the adoration of life lived totally wholly without conflict, but something placed outside there, beyond and above what he considered to be God and made propaganda for that.

So I feel if we could from the beginning use the word 'religion' in the simplest way. That is, the gathering of all energy so that there is total attention, and in that quality of attention the immeasurable comes into being. Because as we said the other day, the measurable is the mechanical. Which the west has cultivated, made marvellous, technologically, physically - medicine, science, biology and so on and so on, which has made the world so superficial, mechanical, worldly, materialistic. And that is spreading all over the world. And in reaction to that - this materialistic attitude - there are all these superstitious, nonsensical, unreasoned religions that are going on. I don't know if you saw the other day the absurdity of these gurus coming from India and teaching the west how to meditate, how to hold breath, they say, 'I am god, worship me' and falling at their feet, you know - it has become so absurd, and childish, so utterly immature. All that indicates the degradation of the word 'religion', and the human mind that can accept this kind of circus and idiocy.

A: Yes. I was thinking of a remark of Sri Aurobindo's in a study that he made on the Veda, where he traced its decline in this sentence. He said it issues as language from sages, then it falls to the priests, and then after the priests it falls to the scholars or the academicians. But in that study there was no statement that I found as to how it ever fell to the priests. And I was wondering whether...

K: I think it is fairly simple, sir.

A: Yes, please.

K: I think it is fairly simple, sir, how the priests got hold of the whole business. Because man is so concerned with his own petty little affairs, petty little desires, and ambitions, superficiality, he wants something, a little more: he wants a little more romantic, a little more sentimental, more something other than the daily beastly routine of living. So he looks somewhere and the priests say, 'Hey, come over here, I've got the goods'. I think it is very simple how the priests have come in. You see it in India, you see it in the west. You see it everywhere where man begins to be concerned with daily living, the daily operation of bread and butter, house and all the rest of it, he demands something more than that. He says, after all I'll die but there must be something more.

A: So fundamentally it's a matter of securing for himself some...

K: ...heavenly grace.

A: ...some heavenly grace that will preserve him against falling into this mournful round of coming to be and passing away. Thinking of the past, on the one hand, anticipating the future on the other, you're saying he falls out of the present now.

K: Yes, that's right.

A: I understand.

K: So, if we could keep to that meaning of that word 'religion' then from there the question arises: can the mind be so attentive in the total sense that the unnameable comes into being? You see, personally I have never read any of these things, Vedas, Bhagavad-Gita, Upanishads, the Bible, all the rest of it, or any philosophy. But I questioned everything.

A: Yes.

K: Not questioned only, but observe. And I - one sees the absolute necessity of a mind that is completely quiet. Because it's only out of quietness you perceive what is happening. If I am chattering I won't listen to you. If my mind is constantly rattling away, to what you are saying I won't pay attention. To pay attention means to be quiet.

A: There have been some priests, apparently, who usually ended up in a great deal of trouble for it, there have been some priests who had, it seems, a grasp of this. I was thinking of Meister Eckhardt's remark that whoever is able to read the book of nature doesn't need any scriptures at all.

K: At all, that's just it, sir."


Saint Augustine;
"If you are silent, be silent out of love. If you speak, speak out of love."


Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī - The Essential Rumi - Childhood Friends;
"You may have heard, it’s the custom for kings
to let warriors stand on the left, the side of the heart,
and courage. On the right they put the chancellor,
and various secretaries, because the practice
of bookkeeping and writing usually belongs
to the right hand. In the center,
       the sufis,
because in meditation they become mirrors.
The king can look at their faces
and see his original state.

Give the beautiful ones mirrors,
and let them fall in love with themselves.

That way they polish their souls
and kindle remembering in others.

A close childhood friend once came to visit Joseph.
They had shared the secrets that children tell each other
when they’re lying on their pillows at night
before they go to sleep. These two
were completely truthful
with each other.

The friend asked, “What was it like when you realized
your brothers were jealous and what they planned to do?”

“I felt like a lion with a chain around its neck.
Not degraded by the chain, and not complaining,
but just waiting for my power to be recognized.”

“How about down in the well, and in prison?
How was it then?”
     “Like the moon when it’s getting
smaller, yet knowing the fullness to come.
Like a seed pearl ground in the mortar for medicine,
that knows it will now be the light in a human eye.

Like a wheat grain that breaks open in the ground,
then grows, then gets harvested, then crushed in the mill
for flour, then baked, then crushed again between teeth
to become a person’s deepest understanding.
Lost in love, like the songs the planters sing
the night after they sow the seed.”
       There is no end
to any of this.
     Back to something else the good man
and Joseph talked about.
       “Ah my friend, what have you
brought me? You know a traveler should not arrive
empty-handed at the door of a friend like me.
That’s going to the grinding stone without your wheat.

God will ask at the resurrection, ‘Did you bring Me
a present? Did you forget? Did you think
you wouldn’t see me?’”
     Joseph kept teasing,
“Let’s have it. I want my gift!”

The guest began, “You can’t imagine how I’ve looked
for something for you. Nothing seemed appropriate.
You don’t take gold down into a goldmine,
or a drop of water to the Sea of Oman!
Everything I thought of was like bringing cumin seed
to Kirmanshah where cumin comes from.

You have all seeds in your barn. You even have my love
and my soul, so I can’t even bring those.

I’ve brought you a mirror. Look at yourself,
and remember me.”
     He took the mirror out from his robe
where he was hiding it.
     What is the mirror of being?
Non-being. Always bring a mirror of non-existence
as a gift. Any other present is foolish.

Let the poor man look deep into generosity.
Let bread see a hungry man.
Let kindling behold a spark from the flint.

An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits,
when they are held up to each other,
that’s when the real making begins.
That’s what art and crafting are.

A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise.
The trunks of trees must be cut and cut again
so they can be used for fine carpentry.

Your doctor must have a broken leg to doctor.
Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested.
Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself
begins to gallop on the way.

There is nothing worse
than thinking you are well enough.
More than anything, self-complacency
blocks the workmanship.

Put your vileness up to a mirror and weep.
Get that self-satisfaction flowing out of you!
Satan thought, “I am better than Adam,”
and that better than is still strongly in us.

Your stream water may look clean,
but there’s unstirred matter on the bottom.
Your sheikh can dig a side channel
that will drain that waste off.

Trust your wound to a teacher’s surgery.
Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,
those flies of your self-protecting feelings,
your love for what you think is yours.

Let a teacher wave away the flies
and put a plaster on the wound.

Don’t turn your head. Keep looking
at the bandaged place. That’s where
the light enters you.
     And don’t believe for a moment
that you’re healing yourself."


Lao Tzu;
"Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner."


Psychedelics: Chemicals, Consciousness, and Creativity -  World Science Festival - With Brian Greene, Reggie Watts, Rick Doblin, & Gul Dolen;
"RD: So a lot of times the hallucinations you could say are making your priors visible, and you can see how then you overlay the world with this, and that you can, you know people that are depressed, overlay the world what this is going to turn out badly, or I can't trust this or that, and that's how people see the world. And then you can see through that, through this therapeutic process, and then when you come back to normal consciousness you've rewired your brain for some of these memories, and they're not processed in the same way. They don't trigger the same kind of emotional notes in your memories, they're routed differently in your brain. So this idea of stability of how you see things is shaken up. I just want to say one last thing too about, you talked about it, does it really reveal more of what's in your mind, than what's in your universe, what's outside in the world? And I would say that, we understand that through the quantum level that we're all connected, it's energy, there's very little matter, mostly space between different things, we're connected in these energy waves. But we don't see the world that way, but that is about the world, we tend to see solid objects distinct from others, but it's a valid part of the world and it's another way of looking at the world. So I think psychedelics give us the chance to not just understand about the inner workings of our brain, but can indeed give us better insights into how the world itself is organized.

BG: Yeah, the only thing I would say on that, I mean I'm open to the idea, but one thing I would say is, in quantum mechanics, this strange description of the external world in terms of probability waves, and quantum entanglement, and things of that sort. It yields testable predictions about the external world that are objectively available to any experimenter, and they all get the same answer. And that's what gives us confidence that we're truly talking about something that is characteristic of the external reality. Whereas the experiences that we're talking about, they are highly subjective, highly individualized, and that is what at least leads me to the possibility that it's really revealing what's happening in yourself, much more than telling us something about out there in the world.

RW: I would say one thing, and this is just my outsider amateur observationalist part-time psychonaut warrior person. I would say that, for instance improvising music, which is something that I love to do, or if I'm on stage and I'm improvising, you enter into a state that is kind of not really in time. It's perceived by myself, or other people playing along, and so forth, as extra time. There's a buffer that gets created, so you feel like you're slightly in the future. I don't think there's any way to prove that or test that, who knows. But it feels as though you have options ahead of you, and what is being experiences by those around you, outwardly perceiving what's going on is in the past, and to a certain degree, most things are. But in music or improvisation that's where you get this kind of um, this psychic effect, where someone knows that this is the next chord change, someone knows that this is when a drum fill is going to happen. You've almost previewed it in your mind, and when it happens, you're like yeah that was what was supposed to happen. And I think this thing that I say like the paradoxical state, it's like the observer, and the experiencer. Like, I kind of view these two things in metaphysics, or where we talk about higher self-lower self, there's all kind of names for it. But there is conscious, the nature of consciousness is a comparison, something aware of itself against something else. So the paradox, which I love, is when I get into these states, and why I call it that, is because there it is everything and nothing, nothing and everything, and in that moment it doesn't really matter, how you interpret or what you interpret because time is the thing that lays down the idea of what you're trying to bring into the "material world". The experience itself is undescribable because it is a needle on the record, it's like whatever is before the needle, and whatever is behind the needle, it doesn't matter, you can't experience it, you can only experience what the needle is experiencing, in that moment, and then remove the needle, and it's suddenly gone. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I feel like when I take psychedelics or psychotropics, it's allowing me to just freely flow as a consciousness, and in doing so it reminds me of holographic principles, where things can happen at a distance in different locations and so forth. I wouldn't be surprised if everything is just a holographic cascading consciousness, awareness of itself, infinitely looking at itself. And so being binary individuals we want to know there's a start, or a beginning, or an end, or there's a linear path, and so forth, which is totally valid. However it is quite possible that it is neither in both, and that's just not fun to think about."


2 Corinthians 1:3-4;
"Blessed is God The Father of our Lord Yeshua The Messiah, The Father of mercy and The God of all comfort, He who comforts us in all our afflictions that we also can comfort those who are in all our afflictions, with that comfort by which we are comforted from God."


Gabor Maté - The Wisdom Of Trauma;
"So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction."


Adyashanti;
"Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #27977488 - 10/02/22 04:31 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Ernest Holmes;
"What you are looking for is what you are looking with."


Nikola Tesla;
"My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists."


Sri Ramana Maharshi;
"The man who loves the all-supporting God with the understanding that nothing can be achieved by his own actions, and who expects instead that all actions will be performed by God alone, that man is lead every minute by God along the path of Truth."


Confucius;
"It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get."


J. Krishnamurti - San Diego 1974 - Conversation 11 - Being hurt and hurting others;
"K: No, I think, sir, don't you, when we are enquiring into this Problem: what is the nature and the structure of a mind, and therefore the quality of a mind, that is not only sacred and holy in itself, but is capable of seeing something immense? As we were talking the other day about suffering, personal and the sorrow of the world, it isn't that we must suffer, suffering is there. Every human being has a dreadful time with it. And there is the suffering of the world. And it isn't that one must go through it, but as it is there one must understand it and go beyond it. And that's one of the qualities of a religious mind, in the sense we are using that word, that is incapable of suffering. It has gone beyond it. Which doesn't mean that it becomes callous. On the contrary it is a passionate mind.

A: One of the things that I have thought much about during our conversations is language itself. On the one hand we say such a mind as you have been describing, is one that is present to suffering. It does nothing to push it away, on the one hand; and yet it is somehow able to contain it, not put it in a vase, or barrel, and contain it in that sense, and yet the very word itself, to suffer, means to under-carry. And it seems close to understand. Over and over again in our conversations I have been thinking about the customary way in which we use language as a use that deprives us of really seeing the glory of what the word points to itself, in itself. I was thinking about the word religion when we were speaking earlier. Scholars differ as to where that came from: on the one hand some say that it means to bind...

K: Bind - ligare.

A: ...the church fathers spoke about that. And then others say, no, no, it means the numinous or the splendour that cannot be exhausted by thought. It seems to me that, wouldn't you say, that there is another sense to 'bind' that is not a negative one, in the sense that if one is making this act of attention, one isn't bound as with cords of ropes. But one is there, or here.

K: Sir, now again let's be clear. When we use the word attention there is a difference between concentration and attention. Concentration is exclusion. I concentrate. That is, bring all my thinking to a certain point, and therefore it is excluding, building a barrier so that it can focus its whole concentration on that. Whereas attention is something entirely different from concentration. In that there is no exclusion. In that there is no resistance. In that there is no effort. And therefore no frontier, no limits.

A: How would you feel about the word 'receptive', in this respect?

K: Again, who is it that is to receive?

A: Already we have made a division.

K: A division.

A: With that word.

K: Yes. I think the word 'attention' is really a very good word. Because it not only understands concentration, not only sees the duality of reception, the receiver and the received, and also it sees the nature of duality and the conflict of the opposites; and attention means not only the brain giving its energy, but also the mind, the heart, the nerves, the total entity, the total human mind giving all its energy to perceive. I think that is the meaning of that word for me at least, to be attentive, attend. Not concentrate, attend. That means listen, see, give your heart to it, give your mind to it, give your whole being to attend, otherwise you can't attend. If I am thinking about something else I can't attend. If I am hearing my own voice, I can't attend.

A: There is a metaphorical use of the word 'waiting' in scripture. It's interesting that in English too we use the word attendant in terms of one who waits on. I'm trying to penetrate the notion of waiting, and patience in relation to this.

K: I think, sir, waiting again means one who is waiting for something. Again there is a duality in that. And when you wait you are expecting. Again a duality. One who is waiting, about to receive. So if we could for the moment hold ourselves to that word, 'attention', then we should enquire what is the quality of a mind that is so attentive that it has understood, lives, acts, in relationship and responsibility as behaviour, and has no fear psychologically in that, we talked about, and therefore understands the movement of pleasure. Then we come to the point, what is such a mind? I think it would be worthwhile if we could discuss the nature of hurt.

A: Of hurt? Yes.

K: Why human beings are hurt. All people are hurt.

A: You mean both the physical and the psychological?

K: Psychological especially.

A: Especially the psychological one, yes.

K: Physically we can tolerate it. We can bear up with a pain and say I won't let it interfere with my thinking. I won't let it corrode my psychological quality of mind. The mind can watch over that. But the psychological hurts are much more important and difficult to grapple with and understand. I think it is necessary because a mind that is hurt is not an innocent mind. The very word 'innocent' comes from 'innocere', not to hurt. A mind that is incapable of being hurt. And there is a great beauty in that.

A: Yes, there is. It's a marvellous word. We have usually used it to indicate a lack of something.

K: I know.

A: Yes, and there it's turned upside down again.

K: And the Christians have made such an absurd thing of it.

A: Yes, I understand that.

K: So I think we ought to, in discussing religion, we ought to enquire very, very deeply into the nature of hurt, because a mind that is not hurt is an innocent mind. And you need this quality of innocency to be so totally attentive.

A: If I have been following you correctly I think may be you would say, wouldn't you, that one becomes hurt when he starts thinking about thinking that he is hurt.

K: Look sir, it's much deeper than that, isn't' it? From childhood the parents compare the child with another child.

A: That's when that thought arises.

K: There it is. When you compare you are hurting.

A: Yes.

K: No, but we do it.

A: Oh yes, of course we do it.

K: Therefore is it possible to educate a child without comparison, without imitation? And therefore never get hurt in that way. And one is hurt because one has built an image about oneself. The image which one has built about oneself is a form of resistance, a wall between you and me. And when you touch that wall at its tender point I get hurt. So not to compare in education, not to have an image about oneself. That's one of the most important things in life, not to have an image about oneself. If you have you are inevitably going to be hurt. Suppose one has an image that one is very good, or that one should be a great success, or that one has great capacities, gifts, you know the images that one builds, inevitably you are going to come and prick it. Inevitably accidents and incidents happen that's going to break that, and one gets hurt.

A: Doesn't this raise the question of name?

K: Oh, yes.

A: The use of name.

K: Name, form.

A: The child is given a name, the child identifies himself with the name.

K: Yes, the child can identify itself but without the image, just a name: Brown, Mr Brown. There is nothing to it! But the moment he builds an image that Mr Brown is socially, morally different, superior, or inferior, ancient or comes from a very old family, belongs to a certain higher class, aristocracy. The moment that begins, and when that is encouraged and sustained by thought, snobbism, you know the whole of it, how it is, then you are inevitably going to be hurt.

A: What you are saying, I take it, is that there is a radical confusion here involved in the imagining oneself to be his name.

K: Yes. Identification with the name, with the body, with the idea that you are socially different, that your parents, your grandparents were lords, or this or that. You know the whole snobbism of England, and all that, and the different kind of snobbism in this country.

A: We speak in language of preserving our name.

K: Yes. And in India it is the Brahmin, the non Brahmin, the whole business of that. So through education, through tradition, through propaganda we have built an image about ourselves.

A: Is there a relation here in terms of religion, would you say, to the refusal, for instance in the Hebraic tradition, to pronounce the name of God.

K: The word is not the thing anyhow. So you can pronounce it or not pronounce it. If you know the word is never the thing, the description is never the described, then it doesn't matter.

A: No. One of the reasons I've always been over the years deeply drawn to the study of the roots of words is simply because for the most part they point to something very concrete.

K: Very.

A: It's either a thing or it's a gesture, more often than not it's some act.

K: Quite, quite.

A: Some act. When I use the phrase, thinking about thinking, before, I should have been more careful of my words and referred to mulling over the image, which would have been a much better way to put it, wouldn't it?

K: Yes, yes. So can a child be educated never to get hurt? And I have heard professors, scholars, say, a child must be hurt in order to live in the world. And when I asked him, 'Do you want your child to be hurt?' he kept absolutely quiet. It was just talking theoretically. Now unfortunately, through education, through social structure and the nature of our society in which we live, we have been hurt, we have images about ourselves which are going to be hurt, and is it possible not to create images at all? I don't know if I am making myself clear.

A: You are.

K: That is, suppose I have an image about myself - which I haven't fortunately - if I have an image, is it possible to wipe it away, to understand it and therefore dissolve it, and never to create a new image about myself? You understand? Living in a society, being educated, I have built an image, inevitably. Now can that image be wiped away?

A: Wouldn't it disappear with this complete act of attention?

K: That's what I'm coming to gradually. It would totally disappear. But I must understand how this image is born. I can't just say, 'Well, I'll wipe it out'.

A: Yes, we have to...

K: Use attention as a means of wiping it out - it doesn't work that way. In understanding the image, in understanding the hurts, in understanding the education in which one has been brought up, in the family, the society, all that, in the understanding of that, out of that understanding comes attention; not the attention first and then wipe it out. You can't attend if you're hurt. If I am hurt how can I attend? Because that hurt is going to keep me, consciously or unconsciously, from this total attention.

A: The amazing thing, if I'm understanding you correctly, is that even in the study of the dysfunctional history, provided I bring total attention to that, there's going to be a non-temporal relationship between the act of attention and the healing that takes place.

K: Absolutely, that's right.

A: While I am attending the thing is leaving.

K: The thing is leaving, yes, that's it.

A: We've got 'thinging' along here throughout. Yes, exactly.

K: So, there are two questions involved: can the hurts be healed so that not a mark is left; and can future hurts be prevented completely, without any resistance. You follow? Those are two problems. And they can be understood only and resolved when I give attention to the understanding of my hurts. When I look at it, not translate it, not wish to wipe them away, just to look at it - as we went into that question of perception. Just to see my hurts. The hurts I have received: the insults, the negligence, the casual word, the gesture - all those hurt. And the language one uses, specially in this country.

A: Oh yes, yes. There seems to be a relationship between what you are saying and one of the meanings of the word, 'salvation'.

K: 'Salvare', to save.

A: To save.

K: To save.

A: To make whole.

K: To make whole. How can you be whole, sir, if you are hurt?

A: Impossible.

K: Therefore it is tremendously important to understand this question.

A: Yes, it is. But I am thinking of a child who comes to school who has already got a freight car filled with hurts.

K: I know - hurts.

A: We are not dealing with a little one in the crib now, but we're already...

K: We are already hurt.

A: Already hurt. And hurt because it is hurt. It multiplies endlessly.

K: Of course. From that hurt he's violent. From that hurt he is frightened and therefore withdrawing. From that hurt he will do neurotic things. From that hurt he will accept anything that gives him safety - god, his idea of god is a god who will never hurt. (laughs)

A: Sometimes a distinction is made between ourselves and animals with respect to this problem. An animal, for instance, that has been badly hurt will be disposed toward everyone in terms of emergency and attack.

K: Attack, I know.

A: But over a period of time, it might take three or four years, if the animal is loved and...

K: So, sir, you see, you said, loved. We haven't got that thing.

A: No.

K: And parents haven't got love for their children. They may talk about love. Because the moment they compare the younger to the older they have hurt the child. 'Your father was so clever, you are such a stupid boy.' There you have begun. In schools when they give you marks it is a hurt - not marks - it is a deliberate hurt. And that is stored, and from that there is violence, there is every kind of aggression, you know all that takes place. So a mind cannot be made whole, or is whole, unless this is understood very, very deeply.

A: The question that I had in mind before regarding what we have been saying is that this animal, if loved, will, provided we are not dealing with brain damage or something, will in time love in return. But the thought is that with the human person love cannot be in that sense coerced. It isn't that one would coerce the animal to love, but that the animal, because innocent, does in time simply respond, accept.

K: Accept, of course.

A: But then a human person is doing something we don't think the animal is.

K: No. The human being is being hurt and is hurting all the time.

A: Exactly. Exactly. While he is mulling over his hurt then he is likely to misinterpret the very act of generosity of love that is made toward him. So we are involved in something very frightful here: by the time the child comes into school, seven years old...

K: He is already gone, finished, tortured. There is the tragedy of it, sir, that is what I mean.

A: Yes, I know. And when you ask the question, as you have: is there a way to educate the child so that the child...

K: ...is never hurt. That is part of education, that is part of culture. Civilisation is hurting. Sir, look, you see this everywhere all over the world, this constant comparison, constant imitation, constant saying, you are that, I must be like you. I must be like Krishna, like Buddha, like Jesus - you follow? That's a hurt. Religions have hurt people.

A: The child is born to a hurt parent, sent to a school where it is taught by a hurt teacher. Now you are asking: is there a way to educate this child so that the child recovers.

K: I say it is possible, sir.

A: Yes, please.

K: That is, when the teacher realises, when the educator realises he is hurt and the child is hurt, he is aware of his hurt and he is aware also of the child's hurt then the relationship changes. Then he will in the very act of teaching, mathematics, whatever it is, he is not only freeing himself from his hurt but also helping the child to be free of his hurt. After all that is education: to see that I, who am the teacher, I am hurt, I have gone through agonies of hurt, and I want to help that child not to be hurt, and he has come to the school being hurt. So I say, 'All right, we both are hurt, my friends, let us see, let's help each other to wipe it out'. That is the act of love.

A: Comparing the human organism with the animal, I return to the question whether it is the case that this relationship to another human being must bring about this healing.

K: Obviously, sir, if relationship exists, we said relationship can only exist when there is no image between you and me.

A: Let us say that there is a teacher who has come to grips with this in himself, very, very deeply, has, as you put it, gone into the question deeper, deeper and deeper, has come to a place where he no longer is hurt-bound. The child that he meets or the young student that he meets, or even a student his own age, because we have adult education, is a person who is hurt-bound and will he not...

K: Transmit that hurt to another?

A: No, will he not, because he is hurt-bound, be prone to misinterpret the activity of the one who is not hurt-bound?

K: But there is no person who is not hurt-bound, except very, very few. Look, sir, lots of things have happened to me personally, I have never been hurt. I say this in all humility, in the real sense, I don't know what it means to be hurt. Things have happened to me, people have done every kind of thing to me, praised me, flattered me, kicked me around, everything. It is possible. And as a teacher, as educator, to see the child, and it is my responsibility as an educator to see he is never hurt, not just teach some beastly subject. This is far more important.

A: I think I have some grasp of what you are talking about. I don't think I could ever in my wildest dreams say that I have never been hurt. Though I do have difficulty, and have since a child - I have even been taken to task for it - of dwelling on it. I remember a colleague of mine once saying to me with some testiness when we were discussing a situation in which there was conflict in the faculty: 'Well, the trouble with you is you see, you can't hate.' And it was looked upon as a disorder in terms of being unable to make a focus towards the enemy in such a way as to devote total attention to that.

K: Sanity is taken for insanity.

A: Yes, so my reply to him was simply, 'Well that's right and, we might as well face it, and I don't intend to do anything about that'.

K: Quite, quite, quite.

A: But it didn't help the situation in terms of the interrelationship.

K: So the question is then: in education can a teacher, educator, observe his hurts, become aware of them, and in his relationship with the student resolve his hurt and the student's? That's one problem. It is possible if the teacher is really, in the deep sense of the word, educator, that is, cultivated. And the next question, sir, from that arises: is the mind capable of not being hurt, knowing it has been hurt? Not add more hurts. Right?

A: Yes.

K: I have these two problems: one, being hurt, that is the past; and never to be hurt again. Which doesn't mean I build a wall of resistance, that I withdraw, that I go off into a monastery, or become a drug addict, or some silly thing like that, but no hurt. Is that possible? You see the two questions? Now, what is hurt? What is the thing that is hurt? You follow?

A: Yes.

K: We said the physical hurt is not the same as the psychological.

A: No.

K: So we are dealing with psychological hurt. What is the thing that is hurt? The psyche? The image which I have about myself?

A: It is an investment that I have in it.

K: Yes, it's my investment in myself.

A: Yes. I've divided myself off from myself.

K: Yes, in myself. That means, why should I invest in myself. What is 'myself'? You follow?

A: Yes, I do.

K: In which I have to invest something. What is myself? All the words, the names, the qualities, the education, the bank account, the furniture, the house, the hurts, all that is me.

A: In an attempt to answer the question: what is myself, I immediately must resort to all this stuff.

K: Obviously.

A: There isn't any other way. And then I haven't got it. Then I praise myself because I must be so marvellous as somehow to slip out.

K: Quite, quite. (both laugh)

A: I see what you mean. I was thinking just a moment back when you were saying it is possible for the teacher to come into relationship with the student so that a work of healing, or an act of healing happens.

K: See sir, this is what I would do if I were in a class, that's the first thing I would begin with, not some subject. I would say, 'Look, you are hurt and I am hurt, we are both of us hurt'. And point out what hurt does, how it kills people, how it destroys people; out of that there is violence, out of that there is brutality, out of that I want to hurt people. You follow? All that comes in. I would spend ten minutes talking about that, every day, in different ways, till both of us see it. Then as an educator I will use the right word and the student will use the right word, there will be no gesture, there'll be no irritation, we are both involved in it. But we don't do that. The moment we come into class we pick up a book and there it goes off. If I was an educator, whether with the older people, or with the younger people, I would establish this relationship. That's my duty, that's my job, that's my function, not just to transmit some information.

A: Yes, that's really very profound. I think one of the reasons that what you have said is so difficult for an educator reared within the whole academic...

K: Yes, because we are so vain!

A: Exactly. We want not only to hear that it is possible for this transformation to take place, but we want it to be regarded as demonstrably proved and therefore not merely possible but predictably certain.

K: Certain, yes, we want a guarantee.

A: And then we are back into the whole thing.

K: Of course we are back into the old rotten stuff. Quite right.

A: Next time could we take up the relationship of love to this?

K: Yes, we will.

A: I would very much enjoy that, and it would seem to me...

K: ...it will all come together.

A: Come together, in the gathering together."


Paramahansa Yogananda;
"You are not determined enough. As the miser loves money, as the lover loves the beloved, so should you love God, then you will find Him, without fail."


Dogen - Genjokoan;
“To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off.”


Lao Tzu;
"I confess that there is nothing to teach: no religion, no science, no body of information which will lead your mind back to the Tao. Today I speak in this fashion, tomorrow in another, but always the Integral Way is beyond words and beyond mind. Simply be aware of the oneness of things."


Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī;
"There comes a time when nothing is meaningful
- except surrendering to Love."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 1
    #27977492 - 10/02/22 04:33 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Ryōkan Taigu (良寛大愚) (1758–1831);
"In the stillness by the empty window
I sit in formal meditation wearing my monk’s surplice.
Navel and nose in alignment,
Ears parallel with the shoulders.
Moonlight floods the room;
The rain stops but the eaves drip and drip.
Perfect this moment—
In the vast emptiness, my understanding deepens."


Ernest Holmes;
"Spirituality is natural goodness. God is not a person; God is a presence personified in us. Spirituality is not a thing; it is the atmosphere of God's Presence, goodness, truth, and beauty."


Paramahansa Yogananda;
"Don't depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don't become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it."


Dogen;
"Students, when you want to say something, think about it three times before you say it. Speak only if your words will benefit yourselves and others. Do not speak if it brings no benefit."


J. Krishnamurti - San Diego 1974 - Conversation 15 - Religion, authority and education - Part 1;
"A: Mr Krishnamurti, we were talking last time together about death in the context of living, and love. And as I remember just as we came to the close of what we were discussing we thought it would be good to pursue this in terms of a further enquiry into education, what really goes on between teacher and student when they begin looking together. And what are the traps that immediately appear, and shock? You mentioned the terror of death, not simply externally, but internally in relation to thought. And it seemed to me perhaps it would be a splendid thing if we just continued that and went deeper into it.

K: Sir, I would like to ask why we are educated at all. What is the meaning of this education that people receive? Apparently they don't understand a thing of life, they don't understand fear, pleasure, the whole thing that we have discussed, and the ultimate fear of death and the terror of not being. Is it that we have become so utterly materialistic that we are only concerned with good jobs, money, pleasure and superficial amusements, entertainments, whether they be religious or football. Is it that our whole nature and structure has become so utterly meaningless? And when we are educated to that, and to suddenly face something real is terrifying.

And as we were saying yesterday, we are not educated to look at ourselves, we are not educated to understand the whole business of living, we are not educated to look and see what happens if we face death. So I was wondering as we came along this morning, religion, which we were going to discuss anyhow, has become merely not only a divisive process but also utterly meaningless. Maybe 2,000 years as Christianity, or 3,000, 5,000 as Hinduism, Buddhism and so on, it has lost its substance. And we never enquire into what is religion, what is education, what is living, what is dying, you know, the whole business of it. We never ask, what is it all about. And when we do ask, we say, well, life has very little meaning. And it has very little meaning, as we live, and so we escape into all kinds of fantastic, romantic nonsense, which has no reason, which we can't discuss, or logically enquire, but it is mere escape from this utter emptiness of the life that one leads. I don't know if you saw the other day, a group of people adoring a human being, and they were doing the most fantastic things, and that's what they call religion, that's what they call God. They seem to have lost all reason. Reason apparently has no meaning any more, either.

A: I did see a documentary that was actually put on by this station, in which the whole meeting operation was being portrayed between the public and this individual in this young 15 year old guru, Maharajji. It was extraordinary.

K: ...disgusting.

A: Amazing. It was in many respects revolting.

K: And that's what they call religion. So shall we begin with religion and go on?

A: Yes, I think that would be a splendid thing to do.

K: All right, sir. You know man has always wanted or tried to find out something beyond the everyday living, everyday routine, everyday pleasures, every activity of thought, he wanted something much more. I don't know whether you have been to India, I do not know if you have been to villages. They put a little stone under a tree, put some marking on it, the next day they have flowers, and for all the people that are there it has become divinity, it has become something religious. That same principle is continued in the cathedrals. Exactly the same thing when you have mass and all the rituals in India, all that, it begins there: the desire for human beings to find something more than what thought has put together. Not being able to find it they romanticise it, they create symbols, or somebody who has got a little bit of this, they worship. And round that they do all kinds of rituals, Indian puja, you know all that business goes on. And that is called religion. Which has absolutely nothing to do with behaviour, with our daily life.

So seeing all this, both in the west and the east, in the world of Islam, in the world of Buddhism and all this, it is the same principle going on: worshipping an image which they have created, whether it is the Buddha, or Jesus or Christ, it is the human mind that has created the image.

A: Oh yes, oh, certainly.

K: And they worship the image which is their own. In other words they are worshipping themselves.

A: And the division, the split, grows wider.

K: Wider. So religion, when one asks what is religion, obviously one must negate in the sense not brutally cut off, understand all this. And so negate all the religions: negate the religion of India and the multiple gods and goddesses; and here the religion of Christianity, which is an image which they have created, which is idolatry. They might not like to call it idolatry but it is. It is an idolatry of the mind. The mind has created the ideal, and the mind through the hand created the statue, the cross and so on, so on. So if one really puts all that aside, the belief, the superstition, the worship of the person, the worship of an idea, and the rituals and the tradition, all that, if one can do it, and one must do it to find out.

A: Exactly. There is a point of terror here that is many, many faceted it seems to me, it has so many different mirrors that it holds up to one's own dysfunction. To reach the place where one is willing to begin at the point where he makes this negation in order to find out, he thinks very often that he is being required to assume something in advance in order to make the negation.

K: Oh, of course.

A: Therefore he balks at that, and he won't do it.

K: No, because sir the brain needs security, otherwise it can't function.

A: That's right.

K: So it finds security in a belief, in an image, in rituals, in the propaganda of 2,000 or 5,000 years. And there, there is a sense of safety, comfort, security, well-being, somebody is looking after, the image of somebody greater than me who is looking after me, inwardly he is responsible. All that. When you are asking a human being to negate all that, he is faced with an immense sense of danger, an immense sense - he becomes panicked.

A: Exactly.

K: So to see all that, to see the absurdity of all the present religions, the utter meaninglessness of it all, and to face being totally insecure, and not be frightened.

A: I sense a trick that one can play on himself right here. Again I am very grateful to you that we are exploring together this pathology in its various facets. One can begin with the notion that he is going to make this negation in order to attain to something better.

K: Oh no, that's not negation.

A: And that's not negation at all.

K: No. Negation is to deny what is false not knowing what is, what is truth. To see the false in the false and to see the truth in the false, and it is the truth that denies the false. You don't deny the false, but you see what is false, and the very seeing of what is false is the truth. I don't know...

A: Yes, of course, of course.

K: And that denies, that sweeps away all this. I don't know if I am making myself clear.

A: Well, I had a very interesting experience in class yesterday. I had given the class an assignment. I think I mentioned this in a conversation we had yesterday, that I had given the class an assignment to go and look at the tree. So in fact I am making a report as to what happened after they came back. Well, one young woman described what happened to her; and she described it in such a way that the class was convinced, and I was convinced that there was no blockage of her looking between herself and this tree. She was calmly ecstatic in her report. That sounds like a curious juxtaposition of words, but it seems to me to be correct. But then I asked her a question. And I said, well, now were you thinking of yourself as looking at this tree? And she hesitated - mind you she had already gone through this whole statement, which was very beautifully undertaken - and I come along playing the role of the serpent in the garden (laughs) and I said, well now might it not have been the case that any time when you were doing this that you thought of yourself looking at the tree?

K: As the observer.

A: And with this hesitation she began to fall more and more out of her own act. Well, we had a look at that, she and I and the class, we all had a look at what she was doing. Finally she turned around and said, well, the reason that I stopped was not because of what went on between me and the tree - I am very clear about that - it's because I am in class now and I am thinking that I ought to say the right thing, and so I have gone and ruined the whole thing. (Laughs) It was a revelation not only to her but you could see with respect to the faces all around the room that we are all involved in this nonsense.

K: Yes, sir.

A: And her shock that she could so betray this relationship that she had had in doing her exercise in just a couple of words, was almost...

K: Very revealing.

A: Yes, extremely revealing, but at the same time desperately hard to believe that anybody would do such a thing to himself.

K: Quite.

A: Yes. Please, please do go on.

K: So, sir, that's it. Negation can only take place when the mind sees the false, the very perception of the false is the negation of the false. And when you see the religions based on miracles, based on personal worship, based on fear that you, yourself, your own life is so shoddy, empty, meaningless, and it is so transient, you will be gone in a few years, and then the mind creates the image which is eternal, which is marvellous, which is the beautiful, the heaven, and identifies with it and worships it. Because it needs a sense of security, deeply, and it has created all this superficial nonsense, a circus - it is a circus."


Mooji;
"I often say to my students, when they first come and they begin to feel the infiniteness, the joy and the deep peace, and they feel very happy, I say to them, Don’t just joy ride. Be quiet. Be one with this. Know that this is beyond belief. This is direct experience. But because this is taking place in you, a storm is coming. And this storm is the storm of ego! The storm of ego is going to come to crush what you have discovered, to bring fear in you, to make you feel that you are making a mistake, to bring in states of confusion. And some of you may give in to that and run away, and feel, ‘No, I must not do this anymore!’ But I want to encourage you. This exercise, this ‘meditation’, you may call it, comes from the very core of your Self. It comes from the God-place in you. And this tendency to run comes from the negativity, the toxicity that we have picked up in life. That is going to come up as though it wants to ruin your Garden of Eden inside your heart. I am telling you ahead of time that all beings who awakened to their true nature experienced these types of resistance, this type of aggression from the mind."


Lao Tzu;
"He who stands on tiptoe doesn't stand form. He who rushes ahead doesn't go far. He who tries to shine dims his own light. He who defines himself can't know who he really is. He who has power over others can't empower himself. He who clings to his work will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job, then let go."


Swami Vivekananda;
"Mind is not a dustbin to keep anger, hatred and jealousy.
But a treasure box to keep love, happiness and sweet memories."


Nikola Tesla;
"Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 1
    #27987492 - 10/08/22 03:29 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Jiddu Krishnamurti;
"Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased."


Nikola Tesla;
"What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics."


Hey Ramchandra Keh Gaye Siya Se;
"It will be so, it will be so...
God Ram had said to Sita (before he left),
such a dark time will come,
(when) swans will be feeding on seeds in the dirt,
(and) crows will be eating pearls.

Sita asked God,
In dark times, will nobody believe in the right way of living and consequences?
to which God replied,
There will be a way of living, and its consequences,
however, there will be no shame,
in every matter, upon mother and father,
the son will show an evil-eye (and tell them what to do).

The king and (his) subjects, in both,
there will be continuous tug of war,
at every step they will both,
do whatever their hearts desires.

The one who wields a stick in hand,
they will win the argument.

Listen Sita, in dark times, there will be black money,
and dark hearts.

The boss of the town will be the biggest thief lifting everything,
and (true) worshippers of God, will remain in poverty.

Those who are greedy and lost in materialistic pleasures,
they will be called saintly men of god.

The temples shall be completely empty,
(whilst) drinking-houses shall remain full.

Together with her father, in a full audience,
dances, a young daughter of his house.

Where is the fathers charity of giving away his bride daughter?
instead, he lives on her money.

Friendships of fools is bad, triumphs of gamblers is bad,
sitting in the company of bad people, your happiness always runs away from you.

In the lamp room, however much precautions you take,
you will always be stained by the ash brother.

No matter how high cast some are, how much holy some are,
company of debased (people) always awakens debased deeds.

Hey listen Gopiram said, (In the dark times) he who has a (good) name and does (good) deeds,
will always have a hangman’s noose placed around his neck brother..."


Lao Tzu;
"To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty."


Ernest Holmes;
"I am guided by the same intelligence and inspired by the same imagination which scatters the moon beams across the waves and holds the forces of nature in it's grasp."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 1
    #27987495 - 10/08/22 03:32 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Ram Dass;
"If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents."


Gabor Maté - UNEDITED FOOTAGE: Dr. Gabor Maté and Krista Loughton;
"You can only lead people as far as you've come yourself."


Sandokai Sutra - The Harmony of Difference and Equality;
"The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from west to east.
While human faculties are sharp or dull, the way has no northern or southern ancestors.
The spiritual source shines clear in the light; the branching streams flow on in the dark.
Grasping at things is surely delusion; according with sameness is still not enlightenment.
All the objects of the senses interact and yet do not.
Interacting brings involvement. Otherwise, each keeps its place.
Sights vary in quality and form, sounds differ as pleasing or harsh.
Refined and common speech come together in the dark,
clear and murky phrases are distinguished in the light.
The four elements return to their natures just as a child turns to its mother;
Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid.
Eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes;
Thus with each and every thing, depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth.
Trunk and branches share the essence; revered and common, each has its speech.
In the light there is darkness, but don’t take it as dark;
In the dark there is light, but don’t see it as light.
Light and dark oppose one another like the front and back foot in walking.
Each of the myriad things has its merit, expressed according to function and place.
Phenomena exist; box and lid fit. principle responds; arrow points meet.
Hearing the words, understand the meaning; don’t set up standards of your own.
If you don’t understand the way right before you, how will you know the path as you walk?
Progress is not a matter of far or near, but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way.
I respectfully urge you who study the mystery, do not pass your days and nights in vain."


Ernest Holmes;
“It is the nature of the universe to give us what we are able to take. It cannot give us more. It has given all, we have not yet accepted the greater gift.”


Swami Vivekananda;
"Never talk about the faults of others, no matter how bad they may be. Nothing is ever gained by that. You never help one by talking about his fault; you do him an injury, and injure yourself as well."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 1
    #27987496 - 10/08/22 03:37 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Nikola Tesla;
"The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. My Mother had taught me to seek all truth in the Bible."


Mencius;
“If you love men and they are unfriendly, look into your love; if you rule men and they are unruly, look into your wisdom; if you are courteous to them and they do not respond, look into your courtesy. If what you do is vain, always seek within.”


Terence McKenna - The Ethical Life;
"The mushroom said to me once, and I've said it to many of you, many times, it said:

'For one human being to seek enlightenment from another, is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another. Don't you get it? It's the same flesh. It's the same flesh. Nobody knows anything you don't know, and even if they do, it's not your knowledge, so what good is it doing you?

The idea that it's okay for you not to understand mathematics, or not to play the violin, because somebody else does it very well, is a complete compound. You will be held responsible for what you know, and what you can do.

It's fun to take responsibility, it's fun to test the water. The hardest thing to put across to oneself, and to other people, is that the universe is a more friendly place than we have been told.

The culture is institutionalized paranoia, and it's very hard to decondition oneself from this. No matter how deconditioned you may think you are, there is more and more work to be done'.

And I think the essence of Taoism, and why its roots in nature are so powerful, is because what Taoism is saying is: 'If you will quiet your mind, and if you will pay attention, you will discover that you are supported, and cared for, by the dynamic of the universe'.

This should be obvious by virtue of the fact that you're even alive. I mean, how unlikely is your existence? I put it to you, pretty unlikely! And yet, here you are. Well do you just think it was the greatest series of well-rolled dice in history? That's silly, that's ridiculous. Probability would never have delivered us. Probability sculpted by loving intent has delivered us.

Once you can sense that living intent, and make it an object of familiarity, that is the antidote to cultural paranoia, and to the acceptance of your identity through imposed definitions by other people.

You know, it really is true as the Bible says: 'You must become as a little child'. And that means you must become pre-cultural, you must recover who you were before the engines of culture went to work on you, and abused you, and made you afraid, and dumbed you down, and distorted your values, and so forth and so on."


Yamada Mumon Roshi;
"All things are embraced
Within the universal mind
Told by the cool wind
This morning."


Ernest Holmes;
“Practically the whole human race is hypnotized because it thinks what somebody else told it to think.”


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 1
    #27987498 - 10/08/22 03:42 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Shirdi Saibaba;
"Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it true, is it necessary, does it improve upon the silence?"


Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī;
"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do."


Myōan Eisai - Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the State (興禅護国論 Kōzen gokokuron) - Preface;
"So great is Mind! Heaven's height is immeasurable, but Mind goes above it. Earth's depth is unfathomable, but Mind extends beneath it. The light of the sun and moon cannot be outdistanced, yet Mind reaches beyond them. Galaxies are as infinite as grains of sand, yet Mind spreads outside them. How great is the empty space! How primal is the ether! Still Mind encompasses all space and generates the ethereal. Because of it, Heaven and Earth treat us with their coverage and support. The sun and moon treat us with their circuits, and the four seasons treat us with their transformations. The myriad things treat us with their fecundity. Great indeed is Mind! Of necessity we assign it names: the Supreme Vehicle, the Prime Meaning, the True Aspect of Transcendental Wisdom [Prajñā], the Single Dharma Realm of Truth, the Unsurpassed Awakened Wisdom [Bodhi], the Heroic Concentration [Shūrangama samādhi], the True Dharma Eye Matrix, the Marvelous Mind of Nirvāna. All scriptures of the Three Turnings of the Dharma Wheel and eight canons, as well as all the doctrines of the Four Shāla Trees and Five Vehicles fit neatly within it.

The Great Hero Shākyamuni's having conveyed this Mind Dharma to his disciple the golden ascetic Mahā Kāshyapa is known as the special transmission outside the scriptures. From their facing one another on Vulture Peak to Mahā Kāshyapa's smile in Cockleg Cave, the raised flower produced thousands of shoots; from this one fountainhead sprang ten thousand streams. In India the proper succession was maintained. In China the dharma generations were tightly linked. Thus has the true dharma as propagated by the Buddhas of old been handed down along with the dharma robe. Thus have the correct ritual forms of Buddhist ascetic training been made manifest. The substance of the dharma is kept whole through master-disciple relationships, and confusion over correct and incorrect monastic decorum is eliminated. In fact, after Bodhidharma, the great master who came from the West, sailed across the South Seas and planted his staff on the banks of the East River in China, the Dharma-eye Zen lineage of Fayan Wenyi was transmitted to Korea and the Ox-head Zen lineage of Niudou Farong was brought to Japan. Studying Zen, one rides all vehicles of Buddhism; practicing Zen, one attains awakening in a single lifetime. Outwardly promoting the moral discipline of the Nirvāna Scripture while inwardly embodying the wisdom and compassion of the Great Perfection of Wisdom Scripture is the essence of Zen.

In our kingdom the sovereign shines in splendor and his honor extends far and wide. Emissaries from distant fabled lands pay their respects to his court. Ministers conduct the affairs of the realm while monastics propagate the path of renunciation. Even the dharma of the Four Hindu Vedas finds use. Why then discard the five family lineages of Zen? Nonetheless, many malign this teaching, calling it the Zen of blind trance. Others doubt it, calling it the evil of clinging to emptiness. Still others consider it ill-suited to this latter age of dharma decline, saying that it is not needed in our land. Or they disparage my capacity, saying that I lack sufficient power. They belittle my spiritual ability, saying that it is impossible for me to revive what was already abandoned. Whoever attempts to uphold the Dharma Jewel in such a way destroys the Dharma Jewel. Not being me, how can they know my mind? Not only do they block the gateway through the Zen barriers, but they also defy the legacy of Saichō, the founder of Mount Hiei. Alas, how sad, how distressing. Which of us is right? Which of us is wrong?

I have compiled an anthology of the Buddhist scriptures that record the essential teachings of our lineage for consideration by today's pundits and for the benefit of posterity. This anthology is in three fascicles consisting of ten chapters, and it is entitled Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the State in accordance with the basic idea of the Sutra for Humane Kings. As my humble fictive words accord with reality, I ignore the catcalls of ministers and monastics. Remembering that the Zen of Linji benefits his later generations, I am not embarrassed by their written slanders. I merely hope that the flame of wisdom transmitted in Zen verse will not be extinguished until the arrival of Maitreya and that the fountain of Zen will flow unimpeded until the future eon of the Thousand Buddhas."


Kamand Kojouri;
"You have no choice.
You must leave your ego on the doorstep before you enter love."


Sri Ramana Maharshi;
"Instead of indulging in mere speculation, devote yourself here and now to the search for the Truth that is ever within you."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 1
    #27991773 - 10/10/22 11:17 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"If a man knows not his own soul, which is the nearest thing to him, what is the use of his claiming to know others? It is as if a beggar who has not the wherewithal for a meal should claim to be able to, feed a town."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"We tried reasoning
our way to Him:
it did not work;
but the moment we gave up,
no obstacle remained."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see -egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be ready to fight the enemy you can see."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Once one is one,
no more, no less:
error begins with duality;
unity knows no error."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"The happiness of the drop is to die in the river."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Break free
from your chains you have forged about yourself;
for you will be free when you are free of clay.
The body is dark - the heart is shining bright;
the body is mere compost - the heart a blooming garden."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Never have I dealt with anything more difficult than my own soul, which sometimes helps me and sometimes opposes me."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"The pure man unites
two in one;
the lover unites
three in one."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Know, O beloved, that man was not created in jest or at random, but marvellously made and for some great end. Although he is not form everlasting, yet he lives for ever; and though his body is mean and earthly, yet his spirit is lofty and divine."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"He is no tyrant:
for everything he takes,
he gives back seventy-fold;
and if he closes one door
he opens ten others for you."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"In God, there is no sorrow or suffering or affliction. If you want to be free of all affliction and suffering, hold fast to God, and turn wholly to Him, and to no one else. Indeed, all your suffering comes from this: that you do not turn towards God."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"He treasures you more
than you do yourself.
Rise, have done with fairy tales;
leave your base passions,
and come to me."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Say to my friends, when they look upon me, dead,
Weeping for me and mourning me in sorrow,
‘Do not believe that this corpse you see is myself,
In the name of God, I tell you, it is not I,
I am a spirit, and this is naught but flesh,
It was my abode and my garment for a time.
I am a treasure, by a talisman kept hid,
Fashioned of dust, which served me as a shrine,
I am a pearl, which has left it’s shell deserted,
I am a bird, and this body was my cage,
Whence I have now flown forth and it is left as a token,
Praise to God, who hath now set me free,
And prepared for me my place in the highest of the Heavens,
Until today I was dead, though alive in your midst.
Now I live in truth, with the grave – clothes discarded.
Today I hold converse with the Saints above,
With no veil between, I see God face to face.
I look upon “Loh-i-Mahfuz” and there in I read,
Whatever was and is, and all that is to be.
Let my house fall in ruins, lay my cage in the ground,
Cast away the talisman, it is a token no more,
Lay aside my cloak, it was but my outer garment.
Place them all in the grave, let them be forgotten,
I have passed on my way and you are left behind,
Your place of abode was no dwelling place for me.
Think not that death is death, nay, it is life,
A life that surpasses all we could dream of here,
While in this world, here we are granted sleep,
Death is but sleep, sleep that shall be prolonged
Be not frightened when death draweth nigh,
It is but the departure for this blessed home,
Think of the mercy and love of your Lord,
Give thanks for His Grace and come without fear.
What I am now, even so shall you be,
For I know that you are even as I am,
The souls of all men come forth from God,
The bodies of all are compounded alike,
Good and evil, alike it was ours.
I give you now a message of good cheer
May God’s peace and joy forever more be yours."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Whatever you assert about his nature
you are bound to be out of your depth,
like a blind man trying to describe
the appearance of his mother.
While reason is still tracking down the secret,
you end your quest on the open field of love."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Verily, the weight of half of disbelief in the world is carried by religious people who made God detestable to His servants."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"'Good' and 'evil' have no meaning
in the world of the Word:
they are names, coined
in the world of 'me' and 'you'."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Bonding and communicating are aspects of action—proof of the extent of transformation through attaining the goal that we had intended. The power to bond with others is an extraordinary human power. It comes in the true sense when bonding develops from the heart and not from either the intellect or the passions. It comes from a deep love for one’s fellow human being and arises when we try to meet the needs of others before our own needs, much like a mother with her new born child."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"My friend, everything existing
exists through him;
your own existence is a mere pretense.
No more nonsense! Lose yourself,
and the hell of your heart becomes a heaven.
Lose yourself, and anything can be accomplished.
Your selfishness is an untrained colt."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"If you see this body don't weep
it was just the cage to
the bird of my soul
which is now free."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"You are what you are:
hence your loves and hates;
you are what you are:
hence faith and unbelief."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"A person in whom the desire for this knowledge has disappeared is like one who has lost his appetite for healthy food, or who prefers feeding on clay to eating bread."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"God is without cause:
why are you looking for causes?
The sun of truth rises unbidden,
and with it sets the moon of learning."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"The Prophet said: Don't sit with every learned man. Sit with the learned man who calls towards five matters towards faith from doubt, sincerity from show, modesty from pride, love from enmity, and ascetism from worldliness."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Worship him as if you could see him with your physical eyes;
though you don't see him,
he sees you."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"O self of mine, keep travelling forever
and do not fall in love with anyone
except the Majestic Lord, the Everlasting."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"When he admits you to his presence
ask from him nothing other than himself,
When he has chosen you for a friend,
you have seen all that there is to see.
There's no duality in the world of love
what's all this talk of 'you' and 'me'?
How can you fill a cup that's full already?"


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"The Prophet said, "Live with each man according to his habits and disposition.""


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Bring all of yourself to his door:
bring only a part
and you've brought nothing at all."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"O youth.......be assured that knowledge alone does not strengthen the hand......Though a man read a hundred thousand scientific questions and understood them or learned them, but did not work with them---They do not benefit him except by working.....Knowledge is the tree, and working is its fruit; and though you studied a hundred years and assembled a thousand books, you would not be prepared for the mercy of Allah the Exalted except by working."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"It's your own self defining faith and unbelief:
inevitably it colors your perception.
Eternity knows nothing
of belief or unbelief;
for a pure nature
there is no such thing."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"The body, so to speak, is simply the riding-animal of the soul, and perishes while the soul endures. The soul should take care of the body, just as a pilgrim on his way to Mecca takes care of his camel; but if the pilgrim spends his whole time in feeding and adorning his camel, the caravan will leave him behind, and he will perish in the desert."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"The way is not far
from you to a friend:
you yourself are that way:
so set out along it."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Faith is confession with the tongue and belief with the heart and work with the members of the body. So long as you do not work, you do not find reward."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Until you throw your sword way,
you'll not become a shield
untill you lay your crown aside,
you'll not be fit to lead."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"A person of good character is he who is modest, says little, causes little trouble, speaks the truth, seeks the good, worships much, has few faults, meddles little, desires the good for all, and does good works for all. He is compassionate, dignified, measured, patient, content, grateful, sympathetic, friendly, abstinent, and not greedy. He does not use foul language, nor does he exhibit haste, nor does he harbor hatred in his heart. He is not envious. He is candid, well-spoken, and his friendship and enmity, his anger and his pleasure are for the sake of God Most High and nothing more."


Hakim Sanai - The Walled Garden of Truth;
"Unself yourself...
until you see your self as a speck of dust
you cannot possibly reach that place;
self could never breathe that air,
so wend your way there without self."


Abu Hamid al-Ghazali;
"Shame upon you, O soul, for your overweening love of the world! If you do not believe in heaven or hell, at any rate you believe in death, which will snatch from you all worldly delights and cause you to feel the pangs of separation from them, which will be intenser just in proportion as you have attached yourself to them."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
InvisibleDividedQuantumM
Outer Head
Male User Gallery

Registered: 12/06/13
Posts: 9,818
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis] * 3
    #28006957 - 10/19/22 07:37 PM (1 year, 3 months ago)

“The next time some sensitive, inquiring person asks you whether you believe in life after death, take my advice. That pompous question—which smarty-pants intellectual Democrat types use to winnow the idiots from their own ilk: Do you believe in an afterlife? Do your personal beliefs include a life after death?—no matter how they phrase their snotty test, do the following. Simply look them in the eye, snort derisively, and retort, ‘Frankly, only a provincial ignoramus would even believe in death.’”  --Chuck Palahniuk, from Doomed


--------------------
Vi Veri Universum Vivus Vici


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisibledurian_2008
Cornucopian Eating an Elephant
 User Gallery


Registered: 04/02/08
Posts: 16,666
Loc: Raccoon City
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: DividedQuantum]
    #28007068 - 10/19/22 08:48 PM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Quote:

Choose the form of the destructor.




Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: durian_2008]
    #28010185 - 10/22/22 02:58 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

I Am Legend;
Neville: [talking to Anna about Bob Marley] He had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate... literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why - He said, "The people, who were trying to make this world worse... are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness."


Ernest Holmes;
“We can no more do without spirituality than we can do without food, shelter or clothing.”


Erich Fromm - The Sane Society;
"The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane."


Hasan Minhaj - Homecoming King;
"Your courage to do what’s right has to be greater than your fear of getting hurt."


Susan Griffin - A Chorus of Stones;
"Because we think in a fragmentary way, we see fragments. And this way of seeing leads us to make actual fragments of the world."


Rainer Maria Rilke;
"The only journey is the one within."


Carl Gustav Jung;
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."


Psalm 92:12-13;
"The righteous will flourish like a palm tree and will spring up like the Cedars of Lebanon.

Those that are planted in the house of LORD JEHOVAH and in the courts of our God, will flourish."


Alan Watts - The Tao of Philosophy - Program 5: Myth of Myself;
"Really, the fundamental ultimate mystery, the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets, is this: that for every outside there is an inside, and for every inside there is an outside. And although they are different, they go together. There is, in other words, a secret conspiracy between all insides and all outsides, and the conspiracy is this: to look as different as possible, and yet underneath to be identical. Because you don’t find one without the other, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle. Note that: agreed.

So there is a secret. What is esoteric, what is profound and what is deep is what we will call the implicit. What is obvious and on the open is what we will call the explicit. And I and my environment, you and your environment, are explicitly as different as different could be. But implicitly you go together. And this is discovered by the scientist when he tries—as the whole art of science is to describe what happens exactly—and when he describes exactly what you do, he finds out that you, your behavior, is not something that can be separated from the behavior of the world around you. He realizes, then, that “you” are something that the whole world is doing. Just as when the sea has waves on it—alright, the sea, the ocean, is waving. And so each one of us is a waving of the whole cosmos; the entire works, all there is! And with each one of us it’s waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo! Here I am!” Only it does it differently each time, because variety is the spice of life.

But you see, the funny thing is we haven’t been brought up to feel that way. Instead of feeling that we—each one of us—are something that the whole realm of being is doing, we feel that we are something that has come in to the whole realm of being as a stranger. When we were born we don’t really know where we came from, because we don’t remember. And we think when we die that’s just going to be that. Some people console themselves with the idea that they’re going to heaven, of that they’re going to be reincarnated, or they’re going to Summerland or something, you know? People don’t really believe that. For most people it’s plausible—the real thing that haunts them—is that when they die, they’re going to sleep and never going to wake up. They’re going to be locked up in the safe deposit box of darkness forever. But that all depends, you see, upon a false notion of what is one’s self.

Now, the reason why we have this false notion of ourselves is, as far as I can understand it, that we have specialized in one particular kind of consciousness. Being very general and rough, we have two kinds of consciousness. One I will call the spotlight, and the other the floodlight. The spotlight is what we call conscious attention, and that is trained into us from childhood as the most valuable form of consciousness. When the teacher in class says, “Pay attention!” everybody stares, and looks fast at the teacher like that. That’s spotlight consciousness: fixing your mind on one thing at a time. Concentrate! And even though you may not be able to have a very long attention span, nevertheless you concentrate; you use your spotlight [on] one thing after another, one thing after another, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, like that.

But we also have another kind of consciousness, which I’ll call the floodlight. For example, you can drive your car for several miles with a friend sitting next to you, and your spotlight consciousness will be completely absorbed into your friend. Nevertheless, your floodlight consciousness will manage the driving of the car, will notice all the stoplights, the other idiots on the road, and so on, and you’ll get there safely—without even thinking about it. But our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight consciousness and to identify ourselves with that form of consciousness alone. I am my spotlight consciousness. My conscious attention, that is my ego, that is me! And very largely we ignore the floodlight.

Now, the floodlight consciousness is working all the time. Every nerve end that we have is its instrument. You know, you can go out to a luncheon or something, and you sit next to Mrs. So-and-so, and you go home and your wife says to you, “Was Mrs. So-and-so there?” “Yes, I sat next to her.” “Well, what was she wearing?” “I haven’t the faintest idea.” You saw, but you didn’t notice. Now, because we have been brought up to identify ourselves with the spotlight consciousness and the floodlight consciousness is undervalued, we have this sensation of ourselves as being just the spotlight. Just the ego that looks and attends to this and that and the other. And so we ignore and are unaware of the vast, vast extent of our being.

People who, by various methods, become fully aware of their floodlight consciousness have what is called a mystical experience, or a cosmic consciousness, or what the Buddhists call bodhi, awakening, and the Hindus call mokṣa, liberation. Because they discover that the real, deep, deep self—that which you really are, fundamentally and forever—is the whole of being, all that there is, the works. That’s you. Only that universal self that is you has a capacity to focus itself at ever so many different here-and-now’s. So when you use the word “I,” this is—as William James said—really a word of position, like this, or here. Just as a sun, or star, has many rays, so the whole cosmos expresses itself in you, in you, in you, in you, in you, in all the different variations. It plays games. It plays the John Doe game, the Mary Smith game, it plays the beetle game, the butterfly game, the bird game, the pigeon game, the fish game, the star game. Just like—these are games that differ from each other just like backgammon wist bridge, poker, pinochle, or like waltz, mazurka, minuet, and so on. It dances with infinite variety. But every single dance that it does—that is to say, you—is what the whole thing is doing. But you see, we forget it. We don’t know; we’re brought up in a special way so that we are unaware of the connection, unaware that each one of us is the works playing it this way for a while."


Kabir - The Songs of - XXX;
"II. 95. ya tarvar men ek pakheru

There is a bird on this body tree
That dances in the ecstasy of life.
No one knows where it is,
And who could ever know
What its music means?

It nests where branches cast deep shadow;
It comes in the dusk and flies away at dawn
And never says a word of what it intends.

No one can tell me anything
About this bird that sings in my blood.
It isn’t colored or colorless;
It doesn’t have a form, or outline;
It sits always in the shadow of love.

It lives within the Unreachable, the Boundless, the Eternal
And no one can tell when it comes or when it goes.

Kabir says, “Fellow seeker,
The mystery of this bird
Is marvelous and profound.
Be wise; struggle to know
Where this bird comes to rest.”"


Ernest Holmes;
“We must be convinced that abundance is the natural state of the universe. To experience and accept abundance in our life, we must be convinced that as we conceive and believe, the universe handles the details.”


Jeremiah 33:3;
"Call me and I shall answer you and I shall show you great and powerful deeds that you have not known"


Doris Mortman;
"Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have."


DMX - Right / Wrong;
"The true worth of a man, is not measured by what he does for himself but
What he does for someone else
And if you help another, without concern for a reward of gold
What you give, you shall receive to tenfold"


Carl Gustav Jung;
"Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic."


Alan Watts;
"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #28013565 - 10/24/22 04:24 AM (1 year, 3 months ago)

Ernest Holmes;
“Change your thinking, change your life.”


Nikola Tesla;
"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."


Alan Watts - The Tao of Philosophy - Program 8: Limits of Language;
"So when we say to ourselves “you must go on,” the reason is, you see, that we are not living in the eternal now, where reality is. We are always thinking that the satisfaction of life will be coming later. “There’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away.” That one far-off, divine event to which all creation moves. Don’t kid yourself. As the Hindus have taught us: in the course of time everything gets worse. It eventually falls apart. Comes kali yuga, and Shiva at the end, and POOM! Which is to say, only suckers put hope in the future.

You see—I tell you, there are three classes of people in the Western world: the aristocrats, the proletariat, and the bourgeoisie. The aristocrats live in the past, because they come of noble family, and they’re like potatoes because the best part of them is underground. The proletariat live in the present, because they have nothing else. And the poor bourgeoisie live for the future; they are the eternal suckers. They can always open to a con game. So when they find out that, really, there isn’t much of a future, you’re going to die, they transpose the future into a spiritual dimension. And they figure this material world is not the real world, but the spiritual world is the real world. And there will be, somewhere, somehow, an eternal life for me.

    A charge to keep I have,
    a God to glorify,
    a never-dying soul to save,
    and fit it for the sky.

Well, then you say to them, “What are you going to do there?” Well, they haven’t the faintest idea. You know that? If you ask theologians about what they think is going to happen in heaven, they just dry up. Oh, you’re going to play harps—I mean, there’s a symbolic meaning to that which I could go into, but the average person’s idea of heaven is an absolute bore! I mean, it’s like being in church for ever. Children see this immediately. Children, when they hear a hymn like, “Weary of earth, and laden with my sin, I look’d at Heav’n and long to enter in,” and they go, “Oh god! Heaven is to be in church for always!” And they think hell is preferable; there’s at least some excitement going on.

And you see it in Medieval art. You go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and you see Jan van Eyck’s painting of The Last Judgement: heaven on top, hell below. In heaven everybody’s looking like the cat that’s swallowed the canary, sitting in rows and very smug. God the father is President and… oh dear. Beneath this there’s a winged skull, like a bat, and squirming bodies, all nude, all being eaten by snakes and I don’t know—it’s a fantastic thing going on. But in that—you see, van Eyck had a ball painting that! Because in Medieval way it was the only way you could get away with painting nudes and sexy scenes; sadomasochistic, see? So that’s naturally why hell became much more interesting than heaven.

So therefore, this hope for the future is a hoax; it’s a perfect hoax. Maybe we will make spiritual progress. Everybody puts it off. Maybe if I work at yoga for ten years, twenty years, and do this thing, I will eventually make it. To mokṣa, to nirvāṇa, whatever. That’s nothing more than a postponement. It’s this business of… because you’re not fully alive now, you think maybe someday you will be.

Look, supposing I ask you, “What did you do yesterday?” “Now, what did I do yesterday? In fact, I’ve forgotten.” But most people say, “Well, let me see, now. Let me get out my notebook. I got up at 7:30 and I brushed my teeth, and I read the newspaper over a cup of coffee, and then I looked at the clock, and dressed, and got in the car and drove downtown, and did this and that in the office,” and so on, and you go on, and on, and on, and you suddenly discover that what you’ve described has absolutely nothing to do with what happened. You’ve described a scraggly, skeletal, fleshless list of abstractions. Whereas if you were actually aware of what went on, you could never describe it.

Because nature is multi-dimensional, language is linear. Language is scrawny, and therefore, if you identify the world as it is with the way the world as described, it’s as if you were trying eat dollar bills and expect a nutritious diet. Or eat numbers; a lot of people eat numbers. People play the stock market; they’re doing nothing but eating numbers. And yet they’re always unhappy, absolutely miserable—because they never get anything. So therefore, they always hope more is coming, because they believe that if they eat enough dollar bills, eventually, something satisfactory will happen. So eating the abstractions all the time, we want more, more, more time. Confucius very wisely said “A man who understands the Tao in the morning may die with content in the evening.” Because when you understand, you don’t put your hope in time. Time won’t solve a thing.

So when we enter into the practice of meditation, of yoga, we are doing something radically unlike other human activities. Of course, the way yoga is sold in the United States—like everything else—is that it’s supposed to be good for you. It isn’t. It has nothing to do with anything that’s good for you. It’s the one activity which you do for its own sake, and not because it’s good for you; not because it will lead anywhere. Because you cannot go to the place where you are now, obviously. Yoga is to be completely here and now. That’s why the word yuj means ‘join.’ Get with it. Be completely here and now.

This is the real meaning of concentration, to be in your center. And the Christian word for sinning—in Greek—is amartánei (αμαρτάνει), which means ‘to miss the point.’ And the point is eternal life, which is here and now. Come to your senses. So yoga is defined—in Sanskrit, in the Yoga Sūtra—yogas chitta vritti nirodha. Difficult to translate, but roughly ‘yoga is the stopping of…’—vritti is ‘turning,’ see, like a wheel. And chitta is ‘consciousness.’ ‘Turnings in consciousness.’ In other words, the attempt of the mind to catch hold of itself, which is what we call thinking, worrying. So you could say, loosely, “Yoga is the cessation of thinking.” It’s not the cessation of awareness, but of symbolizing, trying to catch—clutch—reality in terms of thoughts, symbols, descriptions, definitions. Give it up. It’s not easy because we do it habitually.

But until there is silence of the mind, it is almost impossible to understand. Eternal life, that is to say, eternal now. If you could come to the place where you suspend conceptions. Conceptions, in Sanskrit, are called vikalpa, and so this stage is called nirvikalpa: ‘not conceptual.’ And this will be basic to everything I’m going to talk to you about. To understand nonverbal reality, non-conceived reality—what I call ‘suchness,’ tathātā—it’s really very easy; it’s too easy, that’s why it’s difficult. But when you are fully aware and not thinking you will notice some amazing absences. There is no past—can you hear anything past, coincidentally? Can you hear anything future? They’re just not there, to the plain sense of one’s ears. "


Carl Gustav Jung;
"Spirit, like God, denotes an object of psychic experience which cannot be proved to exist in the external world and cannot be understood rationally."


Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī;
"Close your eyes, fall in Love, stay there.
No more words. Hear only the voice within.
Inside any deep asking is the answering.
A wealth you cannot imagine flows through you."


Alan Watts - Out Of Your Mind - Program 2: The Nature of Consciousness (Part 2) - II - Captivated by the Drama;
"So then, if you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death—or shall I say, death implies life—you can feel yourself not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically—deep, deep down, far, far in—is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

So, say in Hindu mythology, they say that the world is the drama of God. God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne, and that has royal prerogatives. God in Indian mythology is the Self, satcitānanda. Which means sat: ‘that which is;’ chit: ‘that which is consciousness;’ ‘that which is ananda is bliss.’ And, in other words, what exists—reality itself—is gorgeous. It is the plenum, the fullness of total joy. Wowee! And all those stars—if you look out in the sky—is a firework display like you see on the fourth of July, which is a great occasion for celebration. The universe is a celebration. It is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee!

And then they say, however, there’s no point just in sustaining bliss. Let’s suppose that you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would—naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams—you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say “Well, that was pretty great! But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.” And you would dig that, and come out of that and say “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further-out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren’t God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not. The first thing that he says to himself is, “Man, get lost,” because he gives himself away. The nature of love is self-abandonment; not clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, as in, for example, in basketball; you’re always getting rid of the ball. You say to the other fellow, “Have a ball.” See? And that keeps things moving. That’s the nature of life.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not “God” in a politically kingly sense, but “God” in the sense of being the Self, the deep-down basic whatever-there-is. And you’re all that, only you’re pretending you’re not."


Paramahansa Yogananda;
"Be afraid of nothing. Hating none, giving love to all, feeling the love of God, seeing His presence in everyone, and having but one desire - for His constant presence in the temple of your consciousness - that is the way to live in this world."


Hazrat Inayat Khan;
"Love is the merchandise which all the world demands; if you store it in your heart, every soul will become your customer."


Alan Watts - Q and A With God;
"Audience:
Would you say we’re going around in circles trying to eliminate evil because we never will? And it might not be an evil?

God:
Yes.

Audience:
We’ll never eliminate it, so we’re just playing games.

God:
We are going ’round in circles. But, you see, going ’round in circles—as you may have observed by looking at the sky—is what the universe is doing. You see, before…

Audience:
As long as we recognize that we’re going around in circles, we’re alright.

God:
Yes. Yes, that’s the thing: it’s a dance. And when you dance you don’t dance to get somewhere."


Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj;
"Live your life without hurting anybody. Harmlessness is a most powerful form of Yoga and it will take you speedily to your goal... It is the art of living in peace and harmony, in friendliness and love. The fruit of it is happiness, uncaused and endless."


Ernest Holmes;
“Thoughts of lack manifest as limitation. Thoughts of abundance manifest as success and happiness. Failure and success are but two ends of the stick.”


Alan Watts - The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety;
"People are always asking;
"Is it necessary? To know yoga breathing?"
"Is it necessary? To do Taichi?"
"Is it necessary? To, ahhh, I don't know what the hell, to be psychoanalyzed?"

And I would ask;
"Necessary for what?"
"Where are you going?"
"What do you want?"

Yeah, sure, if you want to get to New York it's necessary to take the highway, but where are you going? What do you mean necessary? Well, is it necessary for becoming a Buddha? Anybody want to be a Buddha? Do you know what it means to be a Buddha? How do you know you want to be a Buddha if you don't know what a Buddha is? People think, well, it would be nice to have peace of mind, to be serene, to be calm, to be undisturbed by this, that, and the other. But you see, so long as you make all those things objects of desire, you're defining yourself as lacking them. And a person who is looking for peace is obviously in turmoil. A person who is looking to end conflict is in conflict. And so the more you strive to stop the interior commotions the more you are stirring them up. You're smoothing the waters with flat irons. So then comes up the people who say;
"Alright now, if you are going to tell us, that meditation is not necessary, and that it's all here and now, then why do you meditate?"
"Why do you have religion at all?"
"Why do you have rites?"
"Why do you chant?"
"Why do you do this, that, and the other?"
"Why do you even talk about it?"

And my answer to that is;
There's no good reason for it whatsoever. This is a form of joyous energy, and it's a form of dance, it's a groovy thing to do. There are all kinds of groovy things to do, and to everybody according to his taste. If you've of course you, you, you can make anything, whatsoever, any human activity, into meditation, simply by being with it, and doing it, completely to do it.

In other words, when you are, say, swimming. If you really enjoy swimming, you're not swimming to get to the other side of a river, or to swim so many yards, or competing with yourself, or with other people like that. You're swimming to experience the water rippling past you, the floating sensation, to lie on your back, and look at the blue sky, and the gulls circling it, you are doing that, every moment of it. You are simply absorbed in this ripply luminous world, looking at the patterns, and the shifting net of sunlight underneath you, and the sand way down. That's what it's about, that's what swimming is about, so you're not going anywhere.

Getting together, and chanting together, is what a lot of people do, when they don't have television to look at. In the jungles, on the steps, in mountain communities, since as long as anyone can remember, people got together, and do a thing I call digging sound. And played with the sonic energy of the universe, in just the same way as I described somebody playing with the water while swimming. And these people, when they do that, they don't worry about where they're going, or what their destiny is, or any nonsense of that kind, because they're completely alive.

So to understand all that I'm trying to say, I would like to see if you could change your basic notions of economics, and I mean the economics of energy. We are always scrimping and saving, because our economics are based on scarcity, rather than exuberance. But notice that the economics of nature are allegedly wasteful, they're based on exuberance. Many more seeds, than are necessary for trees, many more spermatozoa, than are necessary for people, many more stars, than anybody conceivably want, galaxies galore. Nature is a vast celebration of energy, but if you complain about this and say;
"Oh, dear me, it's all running out".

That means, you see, that you are looking for fulfillment in time, and you say, if there's not enough future, we won't get the golden goodie we're looking for at the end of the line. See, there's that feeling, there's the great golden goodie, but that flower, that golden goodie, isn't at the end of the line, you're in it. The radiating petals, the mandala, the great circle of the flower, is the galaxy in which you live. It is the whole universe radiating around you, and what you are, and this radiation is also cyclic, it's the dance in which you're involved. If you'd only realize that the purpose of life is not in the future, and if you think it is, you'll go on, and on, and on looking for it there, and never find it. Because the future in it's own way fades out, in the same way as the past fades out. You get older, and older, and older, and if you don't come crash, you just peter out. It wasn't there. You may feel vaguely cheated about the whole thing, you were given "the come on". That there was something coming, there was that thing at the end of the line, the golden goodie. But you've been sitting in the middle of the golden goodie all the time!"


Ashtavakra Gita;
"If you desire liberation avoid objects of the senses & seek compassion, truthfulness, contentment, forgiveness, straightforwardness & love."


Galatians 6:9;
"Let us not grow weary or become discouraged in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap, if we do not give in."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Offlineinvitro


Registered: 05/03/13
Posts: 2,529
Last seen: 1 month, 19 days
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #28015150 - 10/24/22 09:53 PM (1 year, 3 months ago)

"          "


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: invitro]
    #28018910 - 10/27/22 08:35 AM (1 year, 2 months ago)

Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī;
"Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation."


Alan Watts - Divine Madness;
"Well now really when we go back into falling in love. And say, it's crazy. Falling. You see? We don't say "rising into love". There is in it, the idea of the fall. And it goes back, as a matter of fact, to extremely fundamental things. That there is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking this ghastly risk is the condition of there being life. You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble. The moment you take a step, you do so on an act of faith because you don't really know that the floor's not going to give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. The moment that you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship, what an act of faith. See, you've given yourself up. But this is the most powerful thing that can be done: surrender. See. And love is an act of surrender to another person. Total abandonment. I give myself to you. Take me. Do anything you like with me. See. So, that's quite mad because you see, it's letting things get out of control. All sensible people keep things in control. Watch it, watch it, watch it. Security? Vigilance Watch it. Police? Watch it. Guards? Watch it. Who's going to watch the guards? So, actually, therefore, the course of wisdom, what is really sensible, is to let go, is to commit oneself, to give oneself up and that's quite mad. So we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity."


Nelson Mandela - Letting Go;
"To let go doesn’t mean to stop caring:
it means I can’t do it for someone else.

To let go is not to cut myself off;
it is the realization that I can’t control another.

To let go is not to enable,
but to allow learning from natural consequences.
To let go is to admit powerlessness,
which means the outcome is not in my hands.

To let go is not to try to change or blame another;
I can only change myself.

To let go is not to care for,
but to care about.
To let go is not to fix,
but to be supportive.

To let go is not to judge,
but to allow another to be a human being.

To let go is not to be in the middle arranging outcomes,
but to allow others to effect their own outcomes.
To let go is not to be protective;
it is to permit another to face reality.

To let go is not to deny,
but to accept.

To let go is not to nag, scold, or argue,
but to search out my own shortcomings and to correct them

To let go is not to adjust everything to my desires,
but to take each day as it comes and to cherish the moment.

To let go is not to criticize and regulate anyone,
but to try to become what I dream I can be.
To let go is not to regret the past,
but to grow and live for the future.

To let go is to fear less and love more."


Alan Watts - Out Of Your Mind - Program 2: The Nature of Consciousness (Part 2);
"So if a person believes that the Earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that. He knows it’s flat; look out the window and see! It’s—obviously, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him it isn’t is to say “Well, let’s go and find the edge.” And in order to find the edge, you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles; you’ll never find it that way. So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually, when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the Earth is round. That’s the only way that’ll teach him. Because people can’t be talked out of illusions."


Ernest Holmes;
"Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it."


Alan Watts - Zen Bones;
"Now, if you go off in that way, that is what would be called in Buddhism a pratyekabuddha—“private buddha.” He’s one who goes off into the transcendental world and is never seen again. And he’s made a mistake from the standpoint of Buddhism, because from the standpoint of Buddhism, there is no fundamental difference between the transcendental world and this everyday world. The bodhisattva, you see—who doesn’t go off into a nirvāṇa and stay there for ever and ever, but comes back and lives ordinary everyday life to help other beings to see through it, too—he doesn’t come back because he feels he has some sort of solemn duty to help mankind and all that kind of pious cant. He comes back because he sees the two worlds are the same. He sees all other beings as buddhas. He sees them—to use a phrase of G. K. Chesterton’s—“But now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where move in strange democracies the million masks of god.” And it’s fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They’re It. They’re faces of the divine. And they look at you and say, “Oh no, but I’m not divine. I’m just ordinary little me.” You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the Buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it’s not—and saying it quite sincerely.

And that’s why, when you get up against a great guru (the Zen master, or whatever), he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say, “I have a problem, guru. I’m really mixed up, and I don’t understand,” he looks at you in this queer way. And you think, “Oh dear me, he’s reading my most secret thoughts. He’s seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.” He’s not doing anything of the kind; he isn’t even interested in such things. He’s looking at—if I may use Hindu terminology—he’s looking at Shiva in you, saying, “My god, Shiva, won’t you come off it?”

So then, you see, the bodhisattva, who is—I’m assuming quite a knowledge of Buddhism in this assembly—but the bodhisattva as distinct from the pratyekabuddha, bodhisattva doesn’t go off into nirvāṇa, he doesn’t go off into permanent withdrawn ecstasy, he doesn’t go into a kind of catatonic samadhi. That’s alright. There are people who can do that; that’s their vocation. That’s their specialty, just as a long thing is the long body of Buddha, and a short thing is the short body of Buddha. But if you really understand that Zen, that Buddhist idea of enlightenment, is not comprehended in the idea of the transcendental, neither is it comprehended in the idea of the ordinary. Not in terms with the infinite, not in terms with the finite. Not in terms of the eternal, not in terms of the temporal—because they’re all concepts. So, let me say again: I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being schoolteacher-ish, and saying if you were nice people, that’s what you would do. For heaven’s sake, don’t be nice people! But the thing is that, unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. It’s too strong a current for the wire.

So then, it’s terribly important to see beyond ecstasy. Ecstasy here is the soft and lovely flesh, huggable and kissable, and that’s very good. But beyond ecstasy are bones—what we call hard facts. Hard facts of everyday life. Incidentally, we shouldn’t forget to mention the soft facts; there are many of them. But in the hard fact—what we mean: the world as seen in an ordinary, everyday state of consciousness. To find out that that is really no different from the world of supreme ecstasy… well, it’s rather like this: let’s suppose, as so often happens, you think of ecstasy as insight, as seeing light. There’s a Zen poem which says :

    A sudden crash of thunder.
    The mind doors burst open,
    And there sits the ordinary old man.

See? There’s a sudden vision. Satori! Breaking! Wowee! And the doors of the mind are blown apart, and there sits the ordinary old man. It’s just little you, you know? Lightning flashes, sparks shower. In one blink of your eyes, you’ve missed seeing. Why? Because here is the light. The light, the light, the light—every mystic in the world has seen the light. That brilliant, blazing energy, brighter than a thousand suns: it is locked up in everything. Now imagine this. Imagine you’re seeing it, like you see aureoles around Buddhas, like you see the beatific vision at the end of Dante’s Paradiso. Vivid, vivid light, so bright that it is like the clear light of the void in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s beyond light, it’s so bright. And you watch it receding from you. And on the edges, like a great star, it becomes a rim of red. And beyond that, a rim of orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. You see this great mandala appearing, this great sun. And beyond the violet there’s black. Black like obsidian: not flat black, but transparent black, like lacquer. And again, blazing out of the black, as the yang comes from the yin, more light. Going, going, going. And along with this light, there comes sound. There is a sound so tremendous with the white light that you can’t hear it, so piercing that it seems to annihilate the ears. But then, along with the colors, the sound goes down the scale in harmonic intervals, down, down, down, down, until it gets to a deep thundering bass which is so vibrant that, in turn, it turns into something solid, and you begin to get the similar spectrum of textures.

Now, all this time, you’ve been watching a kind of thing radiating out. But it says: you know, this isn’t all I can do. And the rays start going yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, dancing like this. And naturally, the sound starts waving, too, as it comes out. And then the textures start varying themselves. And they say: well, you’ve been looking at this thing as I’ve been describing it so far in a flat dimension. Let’s add a third dimension; it’s going to come right at you now. See? This way. And meanwhile, it says: it’s not just that we’re not going to go yoo-ee, yoo-ee, yoo-ee, like this, we’re going to do little curlicues. We’re going to go lick-achoo, ka-tick-achoo, ka-tick-achoo, ka-tick-achoo, like this. And it says: well, that’s just the beginning! We can go tam, tam, tam, tam, tam, tam, pa-tch, tam, tam, bum, making squares and turns. And then suddenly you see in all the little details that become so intense, that all kinds of little subfigures are contained within what you thought were originally the main figures. And the sound starts going all different. Amazing complexities of sound all over the place. And this thing’s going, going, going, and you think you’re going to go out of your mind, and suddenly it turns into—why, us, sitting around here."


Gautama Buddha;
"As a flower that is lovely and beautiful, but is scentless, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who practices it not."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #28018912 - 10/27/22 08:36 AM (1 year, 2 months ago)

Atisha;
"Avoid places that disturb your mind, and always remain where your virtues increase.

The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.

See all living beings as your father or mother, and love them as if you were their child."


Alan Watts - The Book: on the taboo against knowing who you are;
"Imagine the idea that the moment you were born you were kicked off the edge of a precipices, and you are falling. As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you, and it's traveling alongside you. And you're clinging to it for dear life! And thinking, 'Gee, I've gotta hold onto this'. You see?

Well, it doesn't do a thing for you. And it's only making you anxious, and it's only when as you understand that it doesn't do a thing for you, that you let go and relax.

So, everybody's in this situation. We're all completely insecure! We're all headed straight for death, as if we had been condemned by a judge. And yet here we are all clinging onto things. And we have all sorts of alibis for doing this. We say, 'Well, I have responsibilities for my dependents, and I've got to cling on'. But all you're doing is you're teaching your dependents to cling the same way as you are, and making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively.

So the thing is, the same way you're caught in a torrent, and you try to get out of it by swimming against it, you'll just wear yourself out, and you're still carried along with it. So the sensible thing to do, is to turn around and swim with it! And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge. But go with it! Same way when you're sailing. Always keep the wind in your sails. If you want to go against the wind: tack! But use the wind.

So it's this way, you know, we're all in this great stream of change which we call life, we are the stream! If you imagine you're separate from it, and you're being carried along by it as if you were a cork, that's a delusion. You're a wave of the stream itself, so get with it!"


Hazur Maharaj Baba Sawan Singh;
"The deeper the love for the Master takes root in you, the fainter will be the wordly love in you. His love will displace the love of earthly things. Then the mind and spirit will transcend the flesh and curtains will rise before you, one by one. The dark mysteries of the universe will become revealed to you and you will find yourself in the loving lap of the Holy Father; in fact, you will be one with Him."


Alan Watts - The Tao of Philosophy - Program 3: Coincidence of Opposites;
"But the basis of it all is this, now: if we say, “You must survive,” or “I must survive,” life is earnest and I’ve got to go on. Then your life is a drag and not a game. Now, it’s my contention and my personal opinion—this is my basic metaphysical axiom, shall we put it that way—that existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn’t going anywhere; that is to say, it doesn’t have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But it is best understood by analogy with music. Because music as an art form is essentially playful; we say “you play the piano,” you don’t work the piano.

Why? Music differs, say, from travel. When you travel you are trying to get somewhere. And of course, we—because being a very compulsive and purposive culture—are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster, until we eliminate the distance between places. I mean, with the modern jet travel you can arrive almost instantaneously. What happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey become the same place. So you eliminate the distance and you eliminate the journey, because the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate travel.

In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end! Say, when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room; that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance.

But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, “C’mon kitty, kitty, kitty!” And now you go to kindergarten, you know? And that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade. And then—c’mon!—first grade leads to second grade, and so on, and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school, and it’s revving up—the thing is coming!—then you’re going to go to college, and by Jove then you get into graduate school, and when you’re through with graduate school you go out to join the World. And then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance, and they’ve got that quota to make. And you’re going to make that. And all the time this thing is coming. It’s coming! It’s coming! That great thing, the success you’re working for.

Then, when you wake up one day—about 40 years old—you say, “My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there!” And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt. And there’s a slight let-down because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything by expectation. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then, when they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent, and they go and rot in an old people’s—“Senior Citizens”—community. Because we’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end—success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven—after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played. But you had to do that thing. You didn’t let it happen."


Annamalai Swami;
"To have love towards another human being is a blessing and to have anger towards him is a curse."


Alan Watts - Out Of Your Mind - Program 1: The Nature of Consciousness (Part 1) - VI - An Independent System;
So you see, all I’m trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world that is influencing most people in the United States today—the fully automatic model—is simply a myth. If you want to say that the idea of God the father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth, in a bad sense of the word ‘myth,’ so is this other one. It’s just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs. Why? Let’s get this clear. If there is any such thing at all as intelligence, and love, and beauty—well, you’ve found it in other people. In other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I said, if it is there in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things. We are as symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree, or the rose of the rose bush. The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people. And our existence on the Earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system, in turn, is a symptom of our galaxy—and our galaxy, in its turn, is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies. Goodness only knows what that’s in.

But you see, when—as a scientist—you describe the behavior of a living organism, you try to say what a person does. It’s the only way in which you can describe what a person is: describe what they do. Then you find out that in making this description, you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. In other words, you can’t talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor. Because when I walk, I don’t just dangle my legs in empty space. I move in relationship to a room. And so in order to describe what I’m doing when I’m walking, I have to describe the room; I have to describe the territory. So in describing my talking at the moment, I can’t describe it as just a thing in itself, because I’m talking to you. And so what I’m doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also. So if that is necessary—if, in other words, in order to describe my behavior, I have to describe your behavior, and the behavior of the environment, it means that we’ve really got one system of behavior. That what I am involves what you are. I don’t know who I am unless I know who you are. And you don’t know who you are unless you know who I am.

There was a wise rabbi who once said,

    If I am I because you are you,
    And you are you because I am I,
    Then I am not I and you are not you.

In other words, we are not separate. We define each other, we’re all backs and fronts to each other. You know, you can’t—for example—have two sticks; you lean two sticks against each other and they stand up, because they support each other. Take one away and the other falls. They interdepend. And so in exactly that way, we and our environment, and all of us and each other, are interdependent systems. We know who we are in terms of other people. We all lock together. Now this is, again and again, the serious, scientific description of how things happen, and any good scientist knows, therefore, that what you call the “external world” is as much you as your own body. Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world, it’s a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it."


Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī;
"Listen with ears of tolerance!
See through the eyes of compassion!
Speak with the language of love!"


Alan Watts - The Tao of Philosophy - Program 7: Symbols and Meaning;
"Tonight, at any rate, we’ve got to go through some theoretical materials, so we’re on a head trip. I don’t know where the trip will end up; it depends on you. But in order to lay the foundation for this, we’ve got to examine ideas that are basic to our common sense. Ideas are very powerful. It’s not only emotions that are powerful in human life. Psychoanalysis has, of course, examined the emotional basis of human opinions and beliefs, but one should also examine the intellectual basis of psychological principles, or theories, or therapies. Because everybody who speaks a language at all, has underneath the surface of the language—or the figuring that he uses—certain basic assumptions which are usually unexamined. And these unexamined systems of belief are extremely powerful in their influence over our lives.

We’ll begin with one very common idea that’s built into our common sense, which is that the world—the physical world—consists of two aspects, respectively: form and matter. This was foisted on us by Aristotle and also by the Bible, because it is said that God created man out of the dust of the Earth and, as it were, made a figurine in his own image, and then breathed the breath of life into its nostrils, so that this form of clay became a living being. And so underneath that lies the notion that everything material is made of some sort of basic stuff, like clay is the basis of pots. And for centuries scientists, philosophers wanted to know: what is that stuff? What are we made of? Now, look here: a carpenter makes tables out of wood, and a potter makes pots out of clay. But I ask you: is a tree made of wood? Obviously not. A tree is wood. It’s not made of it. Is a mountain made of rock? Obviously not, it is rock. See, our language contains innumerable ghosts.

Supposing I say “the lightning flashes.” Surely, the flashing is the same as the lightning. There is not one thing called lightning and another called flashing. The lightning is the flashing. It is raining. What is this it that is raining? The raining. I can make a noun out of a verb anytime by turning it into a gerund. So we populate the world with ghosts which arise out of the structure of our language, and thus—therefore—of the structure of our thinking, because we think in language, or in figuring; in numbers. And so it’s of intensely fascinating investigation to find out what are the hidden assumptions that underly language and figuring? In other words, language and mathematics.

And here is this basic assumption, you see, that is almost with us all. It comes again and again into our everyday speech that form, pattern, organization, organisms are made of something, as if there were some inert, primordial, and—of course—stupid stuff which had to be put into shape by an energy and an intelligence other than this stuff. Like the intelligence of the potter shapes the clay. So therefore we have a basic picture of the world in which everything is being pushed around. There’s a boss. There’s somebody in charge who is different from what that somebody is in charge of, and puts everything into shape because our common sense does not allow that things shape themselves. Very odd.

In Chinese, the word for nature is zìrán (自然), which is “that which is so of itself”—the spontaneous. The Chinese have no difficulty in thinking about nature as self-shaping. A Chinese child would not ask its mother “how was I made?” It would ask its mother “how did I grow?” Which would be quite different, you see? So to be made is to be commanded, and therefore every good being obeys. Whether you obey God, or whether you obey the laws of nature—you obey. And an analog, therefore, of the world that has been put into our common sense is one of military command. Note that. Because the image of God—I would go further and say the idolatrous image of God, which has been handed down to us—is one of the beneficent tyrant. The boss, big papa.

So, then, when our physicists started to find out what stuff was, they went into it, and into it, and examined it with ever more minute instruments. They first started cutting up things with knives, and cutting them smaller and smaller and smaller until the particle they wanted to dissect was exactly the same width as the edge of the knife. And so they got an atom, and that word in Greek—átomos (ατομος)—means “the non-cuttable.” Á: “non,” tomos: “cuttable.” That’s the basic atom: what you can’t cut anymore, because you got down to the end. Well, they weren’t satisfied with that. So they got an átomos—in other words, a particle of something or other that was just the same width as the blade of the knife edge—and they looked at it under a microscope. And they saw that it was—[it] seemed to be composed of more, small particles. So they found out means of working those out, and then they found out extraordinary means of investigating the properties of matter. Then they reached a point where they couldn’t decide whether it was particles or whether it was waves. So they called them wavicles. They thought they had come to certain ultimate wavicles, called electrons. But then, unfortunately, everything fell apart and they found protons, mesons, and many other extraordinary things. Because, of course, what they didn’t realize, was that as you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is: through us, and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? You see? It runs away. You never get at it. You can’t bite your own teeth. You can’t touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger. This is the principle.

Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, where he says that that which is the knower—the ground of all knowledge—is never itself an object of knowledge, just as fire doesn’t burn itself. So there’s always that profound mystery that you are never going to be in absolute control of what goes on—because if you were, it would be like making love to a plastic woman. And who wants that? There always is the mystery. Nuh-uh; the thing we don’t know. As van der Leeuw put it, the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."


Ernest Holmes;
"We are all immersed in the atmosphere of our own thinking, which is the direct result of all we have ever said, thought or done. This decides what is to take place in our lives."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #28018914 - 10/27/22 08:37 AM (1 year, 2 months ago)

Charlie Chaplin - As I Began to Love Myself;
"As I began to love myself I found that anguish and emotional suffering
are only warning signs that I was living against my own truth.
Today, I know, this is “AUTHENTICITY”.

As I began to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody
As I try to force my desires on this person, even though I knew the time
was not right and the person was not ready for it, and even though this
person was me. Today I call it “RESPECT”.

As I began to love myself I stopped craving for a different life,
and I could see that everything that surrounded me was inviting me to grow.
Today I call it “MATURITY”.

As I began to love myself I understood that at any circumstance,
I am in the right place at the right time, and everything happens
at the exactly right moment. So I could be calm.
Today I call it “SELF-CONFIDENCE”.

As I began to love myself I quit steeling my own time,
and I stopped designing huge projects for the future.
Today, I only do what brings me joy and happiness, things I love to do
and that make my heart cheer, and I do them in my own way and in
my own rhythm. Today I call it “SIMPLICITY”.

As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for
my health – food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew
me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude
a healthy egoism. Today I know it is “LOVE OF ONESELF”.

As I began to love myself I quit trying to always be right, and ever since
I was wrong less of the time. Today I discovered that is “MODESTY”.

As I began to love myself I refused to go on living in the past and worry
about the future. Now, I only live for the moment, where EVERYTHING
is happening. Today I live each day, day by day, and I call it “FULFILLMENT”.

As I began to love myself I recognized that my mind can disturb me
and it can make me sick. But As I connected it to my heart, my
mind became a valuable ally. Today I call this
connection “WISDOM OF THE HEART”.

We no longer need to fear arguments, confrontations or any kind of problems
with ourselves or others. Even stars collide, and out of their crashing
new worlds are born.Today I know THAT IS “LIFE”!"


Alan Watts - Way Beyond Seeking - Part 2;
"And so the only way you know you can do this is—first of all, in Zen practice, the thing that you have to understand is this: you have to regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh. Because, you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No. They always do the right thing. So, as a matter of fact, do we. Because we are natural beings just like clouds and waves. Only, we have complicated games which cause us to doubt ourselves. But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do—because even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it’ll all come out in the wash somehow or other—then, through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition. Only, the thing that you have to be careful about is—and many people who have not understood Zen properly fall into trouble here—is that when they take the attitude that “I can’t possibly make a mistake,” they overdo it, which shows that they don’t really believe it. So a lot of people come on and say, “Well, in Zen anything goes. You’re naturally with it anyway. You are a Buddha anyhow. And I’m going to prove I’m a Buddha anyhow by breaking all the rules.” And so you put on the weirdest, filthiest clothes, and you go and steal things, and all kinds of things like that. That’s overdoing it. That shows that you haven’t learned. You’re overcompensating. Because before you were told to do this, do that, and the other, and watch, and be self-conscious, and nervous, and so on, and so you just go to the other extreme. But this is the middle way: of knowing it has nothing to do with your decision to do this or not. Whether you decide that you can’t make a mistake or whether you don’t decide, it is true anyway. That you are like cloud in water."


Ernest Holmes;
“Never limit your view of life by any past experience.”


Alan Watts - Do You Do It Or Does It Do You?;
"Lao Tzu puts it in this way:

    The great Tao flows everywhere,
    Both to the left and to the right.
    It loves and nourishes all things
    But does not lord it over them.
    And when merits are accomplished
    It lays no claim to them.

The more, therefore, you relinquish power—trust others—the more powerful you become. But in such a way that, instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you. So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it: “I want to wake up at six o’clock,” and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity—of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe—is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe. That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as an other—as you would another—and say, “Let’s see what you’re going to do.” But in doing that, you see—in saying that to everything else (that you have been taught to think is not you), you are also saying it to yourself.

Because, finally—as I pointed out—you do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. See, there’s this guy, a farmer, who ordered a helping man to come in and found that he was an extraordinarily efficient worker. For the first day he put him on sawing logs. And he sawed more logs than anybody had ever sawed. It was fantastic. They were all done in one day. So the next day he put him on to mending fences. And there were all kinds of broken fences around the farm. And in one day he had the whole thing done. So he thought, “What am I gonna do with this guy?” So he took him down into a basement and said, “Look, here are all the potatoes that have come in from this harvest. And I want you to sort them into three groups: those that we sell, those that we use for seeding, and those that we throw away.” So he left him at that. At the end of the day the laborer came back and said, “Well that’s enough, mister. I quit.” “No!” he said, “You can’t quit! I’ve never had such an excellent worker. I’ll raise your salary. I’ll do anything to keep you around here.” “Eh,” he said. “No. It’s alright mending fences and chopping wood, but this potato business is decision after decision after decision after decision!”

So when we decide, we’re always worrying. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision in any given situation is infinite. So what you do is: you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. And then, when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment. I mean, I’m speaking a little extremely, making some fun of it, and so on—because, after all, we do occasionally get the vague outlines of things and make a right decision on rational grounds. But we fortunately forget the variables that could have interfered with this coming out right.

It’s amazing how often it works. But warriors are people who think of all the variables beyond their control and what might happen. So then, when you make a decision and it works out all right, I think very little of it has much to do with your conscious intent and control. But somehow or other you are able to decide and control things more harmoniously if you delegate authority. It’s why very great businessmen are those who can delegate authority; trust others to work for them. Because those are people developing businesses on the same basic structure that is fundamental to a living organism: delegation of authority. “It loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.”

And, you see, then what is happening is this: the more you let go of it and trust it as if it were quite other than you, the more you realize the inseparable identity of self and other. To go back: if you try to find the identity of self and other by subjecting other to self, no go. If, on the other hand, you find it through giving self (that is, control) over to other and trusting that—you may make a mistake, you may make a bad gamble, but in the long run you’re acting on a principle which has the backing of evolution. This is the way biological evolution goes on: constant delegation of authority. That’s why, obviously, the democracy is superior to the monarchy. Mr. Tocqueville, who said that democracy is always right but for the wrong reasons. Because there is operating in a democracy the principle that Buckminster Fuller calls synergy. And synergy is the intelligence of a highly complex system, the nature of which is always unknown to the individual members.

Because that goes back again to this point that we’re always entering a new environment. We don’t ever know fully what the new environment is because the only environments we know are the past ones. There is always, then—operating in the development of cellular life on any level—a new way of organization, higher than any existing form. And we’re not aware of it until after it’s happened. If you ever saw, for example, the film Kon-Tiki, this man figured out a few things as to how to make a balsa wood raft to sail from South America to the Pacific Islands. But once he had set this in motion he discovered that all sorts of unexpected factors cooperated with him. That, when the wood got wet, it expanded so that the ties bit into it and held it completely secure. He’d never expected that. And he found that, as he sailed along, a flying fish would simply alight flat on the deck every morning for breakfast. That all kinds of natural factors—he had touched a key where he was flowing with the course of nature and everything cooperated with him. Because he had touched the key, he had made the act of faith. And he was just picking up, in other words, a practice which had been hundreds and hundreds of years ago had been followed by others who had worked it out by their great ecological awareness."


Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī;
“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They’re in each other all along.”


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #28034089 - 11/05/22 09:46 AM (1 year, 2 months ago)

Alan Watts - Individual and the World;
"There is a difference between being serious and being sincere. And. G. K. Chesterton, to go back to him, once said that:

In frivolity there is a lightness which can rise,
But in seriousness there is a gravity that falls like a stone.
And thus the angels fly—
Because they take themselves lightly.

So this is true of the Zen people. They take themselves lightly."


Charlie Chaplin - The Great Dictator;
"I’m sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible: Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.

We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another.
In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich, and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much, and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent, and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together.
The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now, my voice is reaching millions throughout the world: millions of despairing men, women, and little children; victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say “Do not despair."

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers, don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate, only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written “The kingdom of God is within man.” Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men. In you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work that will give youth a future and old age a security.

By the promise of these things brutes have risen to power, but they lie, they do not fulfill their promise. They never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Look up! Look up! The clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world a kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last, he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future. That glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us.
Look up! Look up."


Alan Watts - Do You Do It Or Does It Do You?;
"Because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think are good thoughts to think, you will find that you’re going ’round in a circle. Krishnamurti’s awfully good at pointing this out. When people ask him, “How do you meditate?” he says, “Why do you want to meditate?” “Why are you concentrating?” “Why are you saying prayers?” “Why do you think you should believe in God?” And it always comes up: “Because I’m just a son of a bitch. I’m out for my own good, and this seems to be the way.” So he says, “You see? You don’t have any genuine love at all. It’s all fake!”"


Hebrews 11:3;
"For by faith we understand that the worlds were fashioned by the word of God, and these things that are seen came into being out of those things which are unseen."


Alan Watts - Hidden Belief Systems;
"Here we’re getting to the root of the matter: the basic hidden belief system that “I came into this world.” You didn’t. You came out of it. You are an expression of it. You are an aperture through which the universe is examining itself. Just as you have ever so many nerve endings in your retina which (by their multiplicity) see an image, so we are all nerve endings of a cosmos which, by the multiplicity, takes a not-too-prejudiced view of what’s going on. Because the cosmos is feeling itself. Don’t you like to feel yourself?"


Mahatma Gandhi;
“The earth provides enough things for every mans needs, but not every mans greed.”


Alan Watts - Mysticism and Morality;
"When I use the word mysticism, I’m referring to a kind of experience, a kind of—shall we say—state of consciousness which seems to be as prevalent among human beings as measles. It’s something that simply happens, and we don’t know why it happens. And although there are all sorts of techniques which claim to be able to promote it, and which are more or less successful in doing so—and sometimes rather less than more—nevertheless, there is this peculiar thing that happens to people. And it’s been recorded as far back in time as we have any recording at all. And that is coming over people the peculiarly convincing sensation that their ordinary sense of individuality—of personal identity—is transcended, and the individual suddenly feels an experience that… actually, it could be described from a number of quite different points of view. But we could add up these dominant characteristics:

That—instead of the ordinary feeling that I, as an individual, confront a world that is foreign to me, that is not me—in this kind of experience I find myself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the world outside me. In other words, I suddenly feel no longer a stranger in the world, but as if the external world were my own body.

The next aspect of the feeling is even more difficult to assimilate to our ordinary practical intelligence. But a very overwhelming feeling that everything that happens—everything I have ever done, everything anybody else has ever done—was part of a harmonious design. That there is no error at all. And that’s the sort of thing I’m referring to.

Now, you see, I’m not talking about a philosophy, I’m not talking about a rationalization, some sort of theory that somebody cooked up in order to explain the world and make it seem a tolerable place to live in. I’m talking about a rather whimsical, unpredictable experience that suddenly hits people, and it includes this element of feeling the total harmoniousness of everything. Now, I realize that those words can carry with them a sort of sentimental feeling, a sort of Pollyanna feeling. There are various religions in our society today which try to inculcate in you the belief that everything is a harmonious unity. You know, things like Christian Science—or the Unity Movement, and so on—they want to make a kind of propaganda for one to believe, and through believing, to feel that everything is harmonious.

Now, to my mind that is a kind of pseudo-mysticism because it’s an attempt to make the tail wag the dog, to make the effect produce the cause. Because this sensation of things being harmonious is somehow never brought about by insisting to yourself that that is so. Because when you do that—when you would say to yourself all things are light, all things are God, all things are beautiful, et cetera—actually, by doing that, you’re implying that they’re not. Because you wouldn’t be saying all this stuff if you really knew it to be true.

So this thing—the sensation of a kind of universal harmony—can not come to us when it is sought, when we look for it as something to be an escape from the way we actually feel or to compensate for the way we actually feel. It’s a thing that comes out of the blue. And when it comes out of the blue—just like hiccups come out of the blue, or something like that—it’s overwhelmingly convincing and it stands as, actually, the foundation for most of mankind’s profound philosophical, mystical, metaphysical, and religious ideas. Someone, in other words, to whom this sort of thing has happened. And as I said before, it strikes us as measles may strike us. Someone to whom this sort of thing has happened can’t restrain himself when it has happened, and he has to get up and tell everybody about it. And, at last, he becomes the founder of a religion. Because people say, “Look at that man! How happy he is. What conviction he has. He has no doubts. He seems to be sure in everything he does.”

You see, that the wonderful thing about a great human being: he’s like an animal or a flower. See, when a flower buds and the bud goes pop and opens, it has no hesitation or doubts about it. But when a young woman appears in society as a debutante—you know, she’s not quite sure if she’s going to come off—and she appears on the stage of society with some doubts in her mind. Therefore, all appearances of this kind are of a rather sickly nature. But when the bird sings, or the chicken’s egg breaks, the flower buds, there’s no doubt about it at all. It comes forth.

And so, in the same way, when somebody has an experience of this kind he just has to tell everybody about it. Because, you see, he sees everybody around him looking dreadfully serious, looking as if they had a problem, looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult. But from his standpoint—the person who’s had this experience—he feels that they look funny, that they don’t understand that there isn’t any problem at all. That he has seen—from where he stands, you see—that the meaning of being alive is just being alive. That is to say, I look at the color of your hair and the shape of your eyebrow, and I understand that that is the point. That’s what we’re all here for. And it’s so plain, and it’s so obvious, and so simple. And yet, here is everybody rushing around in a great panic as if it were necessary for them to achieve something beyond all that. And the funny thing is: they’re not quite sure what it is. But they’re devilishly intent upon it, after that thing.

And so, to the person in this state of consciousness—which I call “mystical”—that all seems very weird, very absurd."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Invisiblespinvis
Stranger

Registered: 09/15/20
Posts: 586
Re: Greatest Spiritual Quotes? [Re: spinvis]
    #28062897 - 11/21/22 08:22 AM (1 year, 2 months ago)

Jim Carrey;
"The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is."


Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse;
"But as the horse says: “the truth is everyone is winging it.”"


Alan Watts - We As Organism;
"What is important about people, this is the great cradle of the West, is their unique individuality. And we have been given an immense psychic investment in our own individuality by our upbringing.

What are you going to amount to?
What are you going to contribute to human life?
What's your particular destiny going to be?

You see, every one of you feels that you're the centre of the universe, and that everything else is happening around you in a circle. You can turn around and you can see sort of equally far in all directions, especially if you're in a ship in the middle of the ocean, so you're in the middle.

Here's a ball, what point on this ball is the centre of its surface? You can see at once that any point can be the centre of its surface. So legitimately all points in the universe are the centre.

So everybody's in that situation, and at that depth of your existence, we are all like the nerve ends on your own skin. See at every point on your skin, there's little nerve ends going peek! And getting information from the outside world, another, and another, and another, all over, and they all constitute your total sensitivity.

So in the same way, when all these people sitting around here with their little eyes and little ears and things, they're going peek! And they're all really one common centre, called I. Which is looking at itself from ever so many different points of view. Only we are so close to it, and we are so absorbed in the different ways each one of them is doing, that we neglect the community underneath.

If in other words someone from an entirely different form of biology came to this planet, and looked at us, he wouldn't know the difference between Africans, Greeks, Armenians, and white Anglo-Saxon protestants. They would all look to him exactly the same. He'd look at a group like this here, and he would call it a thing.

What is transmitted all the time, is the repetition of pattern, the repetition of certain rhythms. You should all study incidentally the drawings of a great Dutch artist by the name of Escher. He has a book of the most fantastic patterns, where you will see for example an arrangement of devils, and when you look at the background it's an arrangement of angels, that everything goes with its counterpoint. So that when you look at one of Eschers pictures, you don't know which is the foreground and which is the background, you just flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, and you can have it either way.

Well everything's like that, only because as I said, we are fascinated with what we have at the moment selected as the foreground, we say FORE! Foreground, it comes before, it's important, that's what's there. The background, oh... that's just background you see. Supposing you suddenly do a flip on that, you realize the foreground, yeah it's kind of close, but as we say of people, you could only see the trees, you can't see the forest.

Wherever you are looking at the general panorama of sensory experience, try switching, try shifting your attention to all the things you thought were unimportant, to the constants, to the background, and begin looking at the spaces between people.

All painters have to learn this, because especially if you're working in oils, you actually have to paint in the background. Weavers know this, because when they're making patterns in weaving, they've got to weave the background as well, all the same way as the people who made the great oriental carpets. They're much more aware of the background as constituting an essential part of the total experience.

You will see the same thing that you notice in music, it is only as a result of hearing the interval between tones that you hear any melody. If you don't hear the interval you're tone deaf, and all notes are the same noise, you don't hear any melody, you've got to hear the interval.

So then watch the intervals between people, the things that aren't said, the things that are tacit, the things that are implicit, rather than explicit in all life, and then you begin to get connected. You know it's very important to have a connection in life, and this is the way it fundamentally comes out, of seeing the thing you forgot.

Well who do you think you are?
Well how do you answer that question?
Who are you?
Well, you give a name.
You say, I'm Joe Dokes.
I'm Alan Watts.

That's not true! That's what people told you you were. They put that name on you, and they taught you to identify with it, and to behave as it was expected to behave. Go back in your memory, go back into your infancy before they started telling you all this stuff, who are you. And if you get with that you know very well, the jolly old ancient of days! Only there's a conspiracy that you mustn't let on about that, because everybody is!

We worked it in Christianity by a very clever thing, of allowing just one individual to be recognized as the God incarnate. Nobody else therefore could be, so everybody who gets an intimation of who they really are, people say, who the hell do you think you are, you Jesus Christ? Or you can say Jesus Christ said he was Jesus Christ, and everybody put him down for it, and that's what you're doing to me.

Now the thing is, we allowed one person you see, one human individual, to be the incarnate God. Because we have all been living in a theory of the universe, in which the individual is simply involved in something that happens to him. And we feel that this thing that happens to us is reality, it is facts that we have to face, and accept, and cope with, see. It's always something other than you, you don't recognize it as an integral part of your own being. You are not just this irresponsible little mouse that's been chucked down into this world. But that you are really doing this work. You're running it.

Only you can't admit it just in the same way as you can't admit that you're responsible for the way your own heart beats. You say, oh that's not my doing, I have no control over my heart. Do you have any control over being conscious? You say, I intend to take my hand down from my face and put it on my leg. I can do that, but I don't know how the hell it's done.

So you might say, in a funny backwards way, that the only kind of control you really understand, is that where you're not using your will. Because you just do it, so easy, like you open and close your hand. You know how to do it? Sure you know how to do it! But you can't put it into words. But we don't realize you see, that just as we know how to do this, we know equally well, how to turn the sun into light! How to blue the sky! How to blow the wind! How to wave the ocean!

Only you see, you have this marvellous capacity, to transform yourself without knowing that you're doing it. It's just the very fact you see, that you seem to be the victims of a thing you don't understand. And that you seem to conclude your life every time, in a wipe-out called death, where all your control goes. It's just exactly that opposite condition, to what you call being alive, that allows you to be alive. Only every time it happens it's like it's new. Like every time you're born it seem like it was the only time. But of course if it wasn't like that, you wouldn't do it!"


Morgan Freeman;
“Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen—that stillness becomes a radiance.”


Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse;
“Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”


Alan Watts - Do You Do It Or Does It Do You?;
"See, [that’s] where Krishnamurti is so clever—because he says, “If you ask me for enlightenment, how can you ask me for enlightenment? If you don’t know what it is, how do you know you want it?” Any concept that you have of it will be simply a way of trying to perpetuate the situation you’re already in. If you think you know what you’re going out for, all you’re doing is you’re seeking the past, what you already know, what you’ve already experienced. Therefore, that’s not it, is it? Because you say you’re looking for something quite new. But what do you mean, “new?” What’s your conception of something new? “Well,” you figure, “I can only think about it in terms of something old. Something I once had.” So he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t indicate anything positively. Everybody says, “Why are you so negative? Why don’t you give us something to hang on to?” Well, the simple answer is: it would be spurious. You don’t need anything to hang on to. You’re it. You don’t need a religion."


Carl Gustav Jung;
"That which you most need will be found where you least want to look."


Charlie Mackesy - The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse;
"“The greatest illusion,” said the mole, “is that life should be perfect”
my dog walked over the drawing – clearly trying to make the point"


Alan Watts - Q and A With God;
"Audience:
Wait, so then you don’t always know all the answers to a given problem?

God:
Yes, that’s perfectly true. This is called in the Bible kenosis. In St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians he says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, sought not equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a man, and became obedient to death.” And so you get from this the kenotic theory of creation—held by some of the Greek fathers—that the creation of the universe is the self-emptying, or self-forgetting, of the Godhead."


Pirke Avot;
"Ultimate truth is wordless, the silence within the silence."


Osho;
"Do not cling to anything, to any idea; because clinging is the bondage, even to the idea of enlightenment."


Extras: Filter Print Post Top
Jump to top Pages: < First | < Back | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | 107 | 108 | 109 | Next > | Last >

Shop: Bridgetown Botanicals CBD Concentrates   Kraken Kratom Kratom Capsules for Sale   Left Coast Kratom Buy Kratom Extract   North Spore Bulk Substrate   Original Sensible Seeds Autoflowering Cannabis Seeds   PhytoExtractum Buy Bali Kratom Powder   Unfolding Nature Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order


Similar ThreadsPosterViewsRepliesLast post
* Brahman appleorange 767 14 06/01/10 11:42 AM
by Forever White Belt
* Agency, Who is the doer?
( 1 2 3 4 5 all )
syncro 1,016 86 01/27/24 10:05 PM
by Freedom
* frustration searching for truth
( 1 2 all )
norml840 3,073 23 07/05/08 09:17 AM
by SatChitAnanda
* Siddhis
( 1 2 all )
Rishi 5,742 20 12/03/08 06:14 AM
by eve69
* Oneness, by Rasha JacquesCousteau 2,097 5 02/20/09 07:03 AM
by JacquesCousteau
* Prayer of Kuntuzangpo eve69 1,318 4 08/21/17 07:47 PM
by once in a lifetime
* Personal liberation for selfish bastards
( 1 2 all )
Tony 1,761 22 03/31/10 11:17 AM
by Arden
* To create a need; is to need to create!
( 1 2 all )
Gomp 3,046 22 04/06/09 08:36 AM
by Gomp

Extra information
You cannot start new topics / You cannot reply to topics
HTML is disabled / BBCode is enabled
Moderator: Middleman, Shroomism, Rose, Kickle, yogabunny, DividedQuantum
233,342 topic views. 1 members, 5 guests and 7 web crawlers are browsing this forum.
[ Show Images Only | Sort by Score | Print Topic ]
Search this thread:

Copyright 1997-2024 Mind Media. Some rights reserved.

Generated in 0.04 seconds spending 0.006 seconds on 13 queries.