The Library
We are not left to find out for ourselves what the truth is. Now and then messengers appear among us, each bearing his own personal communication about the existence of a higher power and the need of a higher life.
2.1.6.4Listen We may help the Overself in drawing us to the goal by surrendering to the guidance of a competent spiritual adviser or we may obstruct it by clinging to the ego's. But an incompetent adviser will also obstruct it, and in fact become a channel for the ego's truth-obscuring tactics.
2.1.6.5Listen Happiness depends on our understanding of life…
2.1.6.12,Listen Heaven lies within and without us, it is true. But in most cases, only by the intervention of some authentic spiritual genius do we seem able to translate this into actuality for ourselves.
2.1.6.16Listen Something or someone is needed to draw us from the ego to the Overself behind it.
2.1.6.25Listen A phrase or two, coming from an inspired man, may set a subconscious process working in the mind of another and lead him in the end to acquire a new truth or a new view.
2.1.6.63Listen We need to build up an intimate inner relationship with a being whose compassion is wide enough to understand us and whose power is developed enough to help us. It does not matter that he is dead.
2.1.6.78Listen It is not essential to find a teacher in the flesh--he may be in print. A book may become a quite effective teacher and guide.
2.1.6.81Listen In the absence of a sage's personal society, one may have recourse to the best substitute--a sage's printed writings.
2.1.6.82Listen The personal contact with a master does not necessarily require a face-to-face meeting. It can also be effected through a letter written by him--nay, to some degree, even through a book written by him. For his mind incarnates itself in these productions. Thus, those who are prevented by circumstances from meeting him physically, may meet him mentally and gain the same results.
2.1.6.86Listen The perspicacious student will cling steadfastly throughout his life to the writings of illumined masters, returning to them again and again. Their works are the truest of all, pure gold and not alloys.
2.1.6.87Listen One of the helps to kindle this spark into a flame is the reading of inspired literature, whether scripture or not--the mental association through books with men who have themselves been wholly possessed by this love.
2.1.6.109Listen If the strong yearning for truth be absent, a man may meet a thousand masters of the quest but he will neither recognize them for what they are nor experience any exaltation in their presence. This yearning must indeed be as strong as the hunger of a starving man or the desperation of a traveller lost in the desert.
2.1.6.121Listen The seeker who is fumbling for the right direction to take should welcome the help of a competent guide. But where such a guide is not personally forthcoming, the best substitute is a personal disciple of his or, failing that, a book written by him.
2.1.6.163Listen It is often said that when the pupil is ready the Master will appear. But I have not yet read anyone's additional statement—that he may be invisible and unhearable—that is, he may be entirely within you.
2.1.6.167Listen Something within seems to recognize the true teacher when he appears. This is not miraculous when one understands that the visible present has its root in the invisible past and that discipleship is a relation which reappears in birth after birth…
2.1.6.227,Listen Another sign that you have found the right master is when you find that he is the one who inspires you to go more deeply into yourself during meditation than any other.
2.1.6.228Listen He is a true messenger who seeks to keep his ego out of his work, who tries to bring God and man together without himself getting in between them.
2.1.6.342Listen It is the will of a higher power that he, whose own inner eye is open, shall be instrumental in opening that eye for others wherein it is closed.
2.1.6.399Listen What a guide may be able to do in certain cases is to facilitate the awakening of higher consciousness and to make easier the entry of higher truths.
2.1.6.401Listen It is usually quite impossible for the average aspirant to determine who is a fully qualified master. But it is sometimes quite possible to determine who is not a master. He may apply this negative test to the supposed master's personal conduct and public teaching.
2.1.6.406Listen The first service of the Master is to point out the way, both inwardly and outwardly, to the disciple. This shortens his journey by several lifetimes, which would otherwise have to be spent in wanderings, explorings, gropings, and searchings.
2.1.6.442Listen The title ”leader” implies its corollary ”follower.” But a spiritual leader of the kind here described does not want a mass of followers trailing behind him in a partisan spirit. It is enough for him to give others a few inspirations, ideas, insights, and yet leave them free to work on the material as they wish, unobligated to join any movement.
2.1.6.497Listen It is the teacher’s duty to foster his disciple’s creativeness, not his imitativeness—to encourage the disciple to develop his own inspiration.
2.1.6.512Listen The master will teach with love what the student must learn with reverence.
2.1.6.553Listen There is no tie so strong, no attraction so deep as that between Master and pupil. Consequently it persists through incarnation after incarnation.
2.1.6.560Listen This eagerness to become a disciple and learn truth is the first necessary qualification. Without it nothing can be done; with it everything will come naturally in automatic response from the Overself.
2.1.6.638Listen Of all the many forms of work which a man can find to do, of all the several ways in which his active functions can express themselves, there is none higher than this, that he guide men out of illusion into reality. It is not wrong therefore to give his office great reverence and himself great devotion.
2.1.6.659Listen Despite the absence of a teacher, it is still possible to intensify his efforts. His surroundings offer part of the material for study; his personal history can be explored for a greater awareness of the meanings of his past and present experiences; and every situation offers an opportunity for a more objective observation of himself.
2.1.6.683Listen It is not enough to receive a teaching from someone else. The truth of the teaching must be tested by personal experience, the worth of it should be measured by personal knowledge.
2.1.6.714Listen The teacher can only help one to help himself. Ultimately it will be by his own efforts alone that the student uncovers the wisdom and beauty he is seeking--and which are even now within him. Such efforts, in order to be successful, must be courageous and continuous: repeated failures should serve only to stimulate deeper determination.
2.1.6.717Listen The disciple will learn in the end, by experience, that he must look to himself alone for salvation. The last words of the dying Buddha, addressed though they were to his own disciples, have been a useful guide to me: “Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves.”
2.1.6.720Listen ... Whatever is called for to bring on enlightenment exists within himself already, but it is latent and undeveloped. By study, exercise, and practice the aspirant can be his own teacher. Sooner or later he will have to take this work into his own hands. The notion that someone else can or will do it all for him is delusory…
2.1.6.722,Listen He must work harder than ever on his character and, by crushing his ego, sensitize his mind for the reception of the spiritual Grace that is to come during initiation.
2.1.6.761Listen Yet the deeper we travel, the less need have we of thoughts and words, for all multiplicity collapses in this marvelous unity. We can neither think nor talk of this sublime state with any accuracy. Hence the only medium whereby we can properly represent it is--silence!
2.1.6.778Listen The soul will lead him by stages to itself. Hence it may lead him to reverence for some scriptural personage or to devotion toward some living master and then, when these have fulfilled their purpose, away and beyond them. For the quest is from the world of things and men to the world of Mind’s void; from thoughts and forms to the thought-free formless Divine.
2.1.6.796Listen It will not be until a late stage that he will wake up to the realization that the real giver of Grace, the real helper along this path, the real master is not the incarnated master outside but the Overself inside his own heart. What the living master does for him is only to arouse his sleeping intuition and awaken his latent aspiration, to give him the initial impetus and starting guidance on the new quest, to point out the obstructions to advancement in his individual character and to help him deal with them.
2.1.6.816Listen Think more deeply than the conventional mass of guru-followers dare to do and you will come to perceive that in the end there is only one Teacher for each man, his own Overself…Why not go direct to the source?
2.1.6.821,Listen The higher self is the ultimate spiritual guide whom he is to revere and the real spiritual helper on whom he is to rely.
2.1.6.822Listen If discovery of Truth is the discovery of the answer to “Who Am I?“ then what better Master can there be than the “I“ itself…?
2.1.6.839,Listen With the thought of the higher power, an image will spontaneously spring up in his mind. It will be the image of that man who manifests or represents it to him.
2.1.6.844Listen
17 Sep 2018
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21 Apr 2017
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29 Sep 2017
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29 Oct 2021
7 May 2018
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23 Apr 2024
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