The Library
What am I? is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for himself. If he finds the true answer, he will find also that he cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same.
2.1.3.1Listen He must be willing and even determined to think and feel differently from those around him. How can it be otherwise when his goal is different from theirs, too?
2.1.3.23Listen As he goes deeper and deeper into himself, his private acts become more and more independent of other people's suggestions and resistant to their influence.
2.1.3.35Listen Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of mankind. Real freedom is possible only when one is true to one's own self. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit.
2.1.3.57Listen The person, young or old, who has his mind set on higher things than pleasures of the moment and is willing to sacrifice a fragment of time, attention, and interest to such studies and such meditations, will find his refusal to conform to other people's ways is repaid in inner growth on the quest.
2.1.3.66Listen It is to the Overself that he must give his ultimate allegiance.
2.1.3.71Listen If his mind is filled with other people’s teachings, it may give no attention to his own Overself’s teachings, leadings, and intuitions.
2.1.3.72Listen There is a teaching principle in every man which can provide him with whatever spiritual knowledge he needs. But he must first take suitable measures to evoke it. These include cleansing of body and mind, aspiration of feeling and thought, silencing of intellect and ego.
2.1.3.73Listen … if he has no personal guide to accompany him, the Higher Self is still there, within him, pulling, drawing, leading, or pointing, if only he can learn how to recognize it.
2.1.3.78,Listen The Kingdom is within you, not somewhere else, not in an ashram, not even at the feet of a guru: Jesus' declaration is literally accurate.
2.1.3.84His attraction toward this or that teacher may weaken and die but his attraction to the Inspirer of all teachers, the Overself, will keep on growing stronger in him.
2.1.3.88Listen What he learns from outside himself, from teacher or tradition, will never lead to his true fulfilment until he joins it with what he learns in the stillness from inside himself.
2.1.3.93Listen … each will come to God in the end but he will come as a purified transformed and utterly changed person …
2.1.3.97,Listen … All that the teacher can do is to point out the way through the labyrinth; the journey must be made by the seeker himself…
2.1.3.102,Listen Ultimately, there is only one real Master for every spiritual seeker, and that is his own divine Overself. The human teacher may assist him to the extent of giving him a temporary emotional uplift or a temporary intellectual perception, but he cannot bestow permanent divine consciousness on another individual.…
2.1.3.102,Listen All efforts that take him outside of himself are only halting and temporary concessions to human weakness. The soul being inside of himself, he must in the end turn within.
2.1.3.105Listen I have always recommended to those who feel strong enough to be able to do so, to refrain from joining any organization, to keep their freedom, while at the same time studying the doctrines of whatever organizations interest them, whatever religions engage some of their attention. This freedom enables them to look anywhere, to study everything, to question courageously, to keep breadth of view, depth of thought.
2.1.3.127Listen The fellowship of philosophy requires no ritual, no immersion, no dogmatic confession, no creedal test. It is free and non-sectarian. It shuts no one in, no one out.
2.1.3.139Listen Since the real essence of philosophy has only an inner content, which must be felt intuitively and grasped intellectually, but no outer form, it cannot become material for a cult, an organized group. It must lead each person on his own individual way, letting him grow naturally from within…
2.1.3.141,Listen The refusal to join any ecclesiastical church or religious society does not leave a man spiritually homeless. If he faithfully exercises himself in meditation and seeks to practise the presence of God, what better home could he have?
2.1.3.144Listen If the independence of the philosophic position stops him from speaking for any particular established religion or mystical cult, it allows him to view all religions and all cults with fairness and detachment.
2.1.3.147Listen Mind in its ultimate condition is free and infinite. We, as humans, are at the very beginning of its discovery. Let us not set up false steps to our journey or ignorantly put up fences to block our view…
2.1.3.151,Listen Having no official connection with any group, sect, organization, or church leaves me free to help anyone, anywhere.
2.1.3.169Listen Those who feel tempted to do so, may study the public cults and listen to the public teachers but it would be imprudent to join any of the first or follow any of the second. It would be wiser to remain free and independent or they may be led astray from the philosophical path.
2.1.3.176Listen The advantages of being in a position of intellectual and social, religious and personal independence are several. The chance of finding truth and, if luckily found, of expressing it, is surely larger.
2.1.3.179Listen He who depends upon his own personal intellect and personal strength alone, deprives himself of the protection which a higher power could give him.
2.1.3.187Listen Their duty is to act as pioneers; but if they are to be successful pioneers, they will need courage to forget outworn ideas and to free themselves from dying traditions so as to cope with the new conditions which are arising…
2.1.3.195,Listen The freedom to command one’s life in one’s own way can be got only by first getting the fearlessness to disregard the criticism and to ignore the expectations of other people.
2.1.3.196Listen Such is the strange paradox of the quest that on the one hand he must foster determined self-reliance but on the other yield to a feeling of utter dependence on the higher powers.
2.1.3.199Listen When he finds that he can go no farther by himself, the time has come to look within for more grace or to look without for more guidance. He needs the one to get away from his own selfishness or the other to get away from his own darkness.
2.1.3.252Listen One of the most valuable philosophic character qualities is balance. Therefore the student should not be willing to submit himself to complete authoritarianism and thus sacrifice his capacity for independent thinking, nor on the other hand should he be willing to throw away all the fruits of other men's thought and experience and dispense with the services of a guide altogether. He should hold a wise balance between these two extremes.
2.1.3.255Listen Both an inspired church and a qualified master have their place but it is only a limited one. Beyond those limits, nothing outside his divine soul can really help the spiritual seeker. For its grace alone saves and enlightens him ... He will have to learn to rely less and less upon other people for his spiritual and worldly advancement, more and more upon his inner self.
2.1.3.264,Listen It is well to seek and accept guidance. The error and exaggeration creep in when you become too concentrated on a single source of guidance.
2.1.3.265Listen The duty of the aspirant to cultivate his moral character and to accept personal responsibility for his inner life cannot be evaded by giving allegiance to any spiritual authority.
2.1.3.271Listen The necessity of a teacher is much exaggerated. His own soul is there, ready to lead him to itself. For this prayer, meditation, study, and right living will be enough to find its Grace. If he has sufficient faith in its reality and tries to be sensitive to its intuitive guidance he needs no external teacher.
2.1.3.274Listen Listening to someone else's teaching, or reading it, will only be a temporary makeshift until the day when he can establish communication with his own intuitive self and receive from it the teaching which he, as a unique individual, needs. From no other source can he get such specially suitable instruction.
2.1.3.277Listen In the absence of a master let him follow a lone path, welcoming whatever he can learn from competent authorities but attaching himself to none.
2.1.3.281Listen To find out the truth little by little by oneself is to make it really one's own. To be pushed into it with a plunge by a master always entails the likelihood of a return to one's native and proper level later on.
2.1.3.289Listen Something more is needed than what books or even gurus can give him. This can only be found within himself. The courage needed for such a standpoint must also be found, and can be, within himself.
2.1.3.292Listen ... When a man begins his spiritual quest, it is solely by his own strivings that he makes his initial progress. The time comes, however, when this progress seems to stop and when he seems to stagnate. He has come to the end of a stage which was really a preparatory one. The stagnation indicates that the path of self-effort is no longer sufficient and that he must now enter upon the path of reliance upon Grace...
2.1.3.314,Listen ... In the earlier stage, the Ego was the agent for all his spiritual activities, whilst it provided the motives which impelled him into these activities. But the Ego can never be really sincere in desiring its own destruction, nor can it ever draw from its own resources the power to rise above itself. So it must reach this point where it ceases self-effort and surrenders itself to the higher power which may be variously named God or the Higher Self, and relies on that power for further progress…
2.1.3.314,Listen The feeling of being isolated, the sense of walking a lonely path, is true outwardly but untrue inwardly. For there he is companioned by the Overself's gentle ever-drawing love. He has only to grope within sufficiently to know this for himself, and to know it with absolute certitude.
2.1.3.321Listen The higher the peak one climbs, the lonelier the trail becomes. There is a paradox here for the loneliness exists outside the body, not inside the heart, and the more it grows outside the less it is felt inside.
2.1.3.322Listen The cure for loneliness is company; but if there is no affinity in the company, then it is only a quack cure. This prescription is true for everyone, even for the sage, for he finds his company in the Overself's self-presence.
2.1.3.336Listen There is only one real loneliness and that is to feel cut off from the higher power.
2.1.3.340Listen
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