Day by day

Failure to act at the right time in the right way may bring its own karmic consequences.
6.9.3.239Listen 1 Dec 2024Socrates once declared, “I am a man and like other men a creature of flesh and blood.” He was married and had three sons. Yet this did not prevent him from attaining a lofty wisdom and the highest intellectual clarity and magnificent moral rectitude.
9.13.2.469Listen 2 Dec 2024Where can he find this peace or practise this presence except in himself? This done, he can go about his daily business anywhere and everywhere.
14.22.3.73Listen 3 Dec 2024Throughout the darkest period of intense suffering, the Overself was all the time present, supporting and strengthening him to bear what there could be no escape from, what his higher destiny had irrevocably willed in order to detach him still further from egoism and personal ties. He was in its hands always, in joy and in sorrow alike.
8.12.3.69Listen 4 Dec 2024Meditation is not a one-sided but a two-sided affair. We begin to practise by being mentally active, but after getting well into it, we can continue only by being mentally passive.
4.4.1.144Listen 5 Dec 2024In the end philosophy is not only for the minority of well-educated minds or for the elite of the persons refined by culture, upbringing, innate sensitivity, but also for the majority who can take it in partially; here and there some points can be grasped and accepted …
13.20.2.23, ExcerptListen 6 Dec 2024The highly personal man is too full of himself to leave any room for the soul, with its utter impersonality, to enter his field of awareness.
11.16.14.134Listen 7 Dec 2024When he finds that he has been following his own will even at those times when he believed he was following the higher self’s will, he begins to realize the extent of the ego’s power, the length of the period required for its subdual, and what he will have to suffer before this is achieved.
6.8.4.356Listen 8 Dec 2024To play the role of spiritual adviser to any person is to accept a grave responsibility.
16.25.5.67Listen 9 Dec 2024As the human mind develops, it forms higher and higher conceptions of the deity until, finally, it is lifted above itself into a tremendous experience. It loses itself in the deity itself, and when it returns to normal living, it does not need to seek further. I do not refer here to the experience which several mystics have had called “the glimpse,” but something which is of a once-and-for-all nature and which does not, in its essence, ever leave him.
16.25.2.26Listen 10 Dec 2024The saying that “experience is the best teacher” is one I often thought should be altered to “experience is most often the only teacher.” It is surely better to be taught by reflection and intuition.
6.9.4.96Listen 11 Dec 2024The contribution of intellect is indispensable. But it is not enough. It leaves a most important part of the psyche—the intuition—still untouched.
5.7.1.197Listen 12 Dec 2024Whoever wants to seek for Truth will learn more if he sets up as a standard: Nothing but the best—why settle for less?
16.25.5.161Listen 13 Dec 2024The self-image which he holds may continue to keep him tied or help to set him free.
6.8.4.382Listen 14 Dec 2024In a certain type of person the most important factor in the inner life is the cultivation of the harder qualities like will, decision, execution, endurance, determination, energy, and the like.
3.2.5.57Listen 15 Dec 2024The Quest teaches a man the art of dying to the animalistic and egoistic elements in himself. But it does not stop with these negative results. It trains him also in the art of re-creating himself by the light of the ideal.
2.1.1.32Listen 16 Dec 2024It is prudent to keep away from temptation—at least until enough positive strength has been developed to risk the test …
5.6.3.82, ExcerptListen 17 Dec 2024Karma, being made by human will, is subject to human modification. Fate, being decreed by the higher power, is not. The general fact of death is an example of fate, and in this sense the poet James Shirley’s line: “There is no armour against Fate,” is true. But the particular fact of death, its time and manner, may be alterable.
6.9.3.31Listen 18 Dec 2024How is one to describe this experience? It is an expansion, and yet also a concentration, of consciousness.
14.22.4.14Listen 19 Dec 2024Whoever develops these powers of the Overself must develop a strong sense of responsibility with them, an awareness that they have been entrusted to him as to a custodian. The grace which allows them can also disallow them.
13.21.5.56Listen 20 Dec 2024When the highly personal egocentric attitude is first displaced by the Overself, there is a sense of sharp liberation and utter relief.
14.22.22.88Listen 21 Dec 2024Behind the work of a poet or composer true to art’s higher mission is this hidden power of his own higher self. It bestows the inspiration which permeates his work.
9.14.1.169Listen 22 Dec 2024When he has found the truth, he has nothing to decide. He will realize that the ALL, this whole teeming universe, is himself, that all creatures and all men are one. Therefore their interests and their welfare become his automatically. Therefore he will come back to earth again and again to help all beings attain truth and happiness. The notion of choosing selfish bliss or unselfish service does not occur to those who have realized truth …
16.25.4.41Listen 23 Dec 2024All such turning to religion and mysticism is really due to a sense of nostalgia, a yearning for our true Home.
12.17.1.40Listen 24 Dec 2024Somewhere in her writings Blavatsky says that the universe, however vast, is finite. But Epicurus, in a sharply termed piece of logic, tries to demonstrate that the universe is infinite. He says, “That which is finite has an end; who would deny that? Again that which has an end is seen from some point outside itself; that too must be granted; but the universe is not seen from without itself; we cannot question that proposition either; therefore since it has no end the universe must be infinite.”
16.26.1.239Listen 25 Dec 2024When the Overself’s will is the motivating power in his life, all strain and all effort to act rightly cease.
14.22.2.52Listen 26 Dec 2024… In the mind’s deep stillness we live neither in past memories nor future fears and hopes, nor in the moving present, but only in an emptiness which is the everlasting Now. Here alone we can remain in unbroken peace, paid for by being devoid of expectations and free from desires, cut off from attachments and above the day’s agitations or oscillations.
13.19.4.211, ExcerptListen 27 Dec 2024Only in perfect stillness of the mind, when all discursive and invading thoughts are expelled, can the true purity be attained and the ego expelled with them.
15.23.7.163Listen 28 Dec 2024… The world does not exist solely for the benefit of the human species. It is a means of development and expression for all kinds of creatures, a development in which the humans share so largely.
16.26.4.183, ExcerptListen 29 Dec 2024The Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece once visited the sacred oracle at Delphi and left two offerings in the temple. Both were maxims and were subsequently carved on the building. The first is famous: “Know Thyself.” The second is: “Nothing too much.” The first points to the peaks of human experience. The second warns us against the dangers of the quest (as well as of life) and how to avoid them by keeping our efforts in balance.
10.15.6.36Listen 30 Dec 2024It is good to pray that the coming year may find in you a more aspiring and more determined person, a calmer and better balanced seeker after truth.
12.18.2.35Listen 31 Dec 2024
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