Although it is not possible to offer irrefutable scientific proof of the doctrine of spiritual evolution, it can be shown to be as reasonable a doctrine as any of its rivals. And for those who have had mystical experience of the divine presence behind the mind, of divine wisdom behind the cosmos, it is the only acceptable doctrine.
16.26.4.13 | • Listen | 29 Jan 2012 |
No living creature in the kingdom of animals knows more than its immediate surroundings or cares for more than the sustenance of its immediate existence. It lives in an immense and varied universe but that fact is lost to its mentality and outside its interest. Only when the evolving entity attains the stage of developed human beings does this unconsciousness disappear. Then life takes on a larger meaning and the life-force becomes aware of itself, individualized, self-conscious. Only then does a higher purpose become possible and apparent.
16.26.4.26 | • Listen | 4 Jun 2011 |
We are not just higher animals and nothing more but are possessed of something that the other animals do not possess--a self-consciousness which can be developed until it matures into a thinking power as well as a totally superior kind of awareness--that of the Overself.
16.26.4.43 | • Listen | 21 Mar 2013 |
The choice between submitting or not submitting to his animal genes and hormones belongs to man, but the tendency to follow them belongs to the earlier stage; it is very, very ancient and is coming under his control very, very slowly. He fulfils himself as truly human when this transcendence of his ancestry is complete.
16.26.4.47 | • Listen | 6 May 2017 |
… We are animals in one part of our nature, human beings in the second part, and sometimes angelic in the third part. All make one creature. We learn what our bodies are through the physical senses. We learn a part of what the mind is through our thoughts. We learn still more about the mind's deeper phases through our non-thoughts--that is, intuitions.
16.26.4.54, Excerpt | • Listen | 7 Jun 2017 |
... The cosmos may be annihilated or disintegrate completely but the creative idea of it will still live on in the World-Mind. More, in the same way a man's body may die and disintegrate, but the creative idea of him will still remain in the World-Mind as his Soul. It will not die. It's his real Self, his perfect Self. It is the true Idea of him which is forever calling to be realized. It is the unmanifest image of God in which man is made and which he has yet to bring into manifestation in his everyday consciousness.
16.26.4.63, Excerpt | • Listen | 6 Feb 2012 |
The man who, according to the Bible, is made in the image of God is not the earthly man, visible to all and speaking in a voice that sounds in physical ears. He is to be found in the deep centre of consciousness, where there is only a Void, and he speaks in silence to the attentive mind, not to other persons.
16.26.4.73 | • Listen | 27 Apr 2013 |
If we do not know the “why” of universal existence, we do know the “why” of human existence. It provides the field of experience for discovering the divine soul. The integral quest which ends in this discovery is, consequently, the greatest and most important of human undertakings.
16.26.4.82 | • Listen | 2 Jan 2012 |
When one is allowed a glimpse of the World-Idea, he feels that he understands at last why he came here, what he has to do, and where his place is. It is like an immense enlargement of the mind, an escape from the littleness of the ego, and a finding-out of a long-hidden secret.
16.26.4.121 | • Listen | 8 Apr 2013 |
... This is the use he is to make of his life on earth: his personal life, his family relations, his professional career--all must become subject to the higher purpose. The resolve made, the matter of success or failure is no longer urgent, for every subsequent embodiment will point in this direction. Philosophy has instructed him in the unreality of time and has revealed to him his indissoluble connection with the Overself…
16.26.4.123, Excerpt | • Listen | 13 Jun 2012 |
He has come to the inner sight of the World-Idea's meaning for him: that he is to use the human self to lift his nature up from the animal one, and that he is to put himself at the service of his angelic, his best, self, to lift his nature up from the ordinary human. In this way he co-operates with the World-Idea.
16.26.4.123, Excerpt | • Listen | 15 Oct 2017 |
This earth, with the varied experiences of good and evil, joy and suffering, peace and peril which it offers us, is a school of initiation leading primitive animal man into the development of awareness until he reaches the first discovery of his Overself.
16.26.4.181 | 30 Dec 2010 |
There is no choice in the matter, ultimately, although there is immediately. The entire human race will have to traverse the course chalked out for it, will have to develop the finer feelings, the concrete intellect, the abstract intellect, the balance between the different sides. If men do not seek to do so now, it is only a question of time before they will be forced to do so later.
16.26.4.214 | 23 May 2011 |
The World-Idea is operative on every level. It invites savage humans to outwit their fellow animals by beginning to use brain-power through arrows, slings, and primitive traps; at a higher level to compete with fellow humans and rise economically and socially by using the same power; at a still higher level to reduce sufferings and self-made miseries by practising control over self and avoidance of injury to others; then, at a still higher level, to discover and nurture their spiritual nature.
16.26.4.218 | • Listen | 5 May 2015 |
The inhabitants of each planet belong to different stages of evolution: some higher and some lower. This applies not only to the human inhabitants but also to the animal and even the plant inhabitants. They pass in great waves from one planet to another at certain stages of this evolution, going where they can find the most appropriate conditions either for expression of their present stage or for the stimulation of their next immediate stage. Consequently the stragglers and laggards who fall behind pass to a planet where the conditions are of a lower nature, for there they are more at home. On the other hand, the pioneers who have outstripped the mass and can find no conditions suitable for their further development pass to a planet in a higher stage.
16.26.4.236 | • Listen | 17 Apr 2017 |
Human beings have made too much fuss about themselves, their own importance in the cosmic scale. Why should there not be other forms of life superior to them, conscious intelligent beings higher in mentality, character, and spiritual knowledge, better equipped with powers and techniques?
16.26.4.238 | • Listen | 12 Jan 2012 |
His destination is also his origin. But to say that he was born in the eternal Spirit starts the question, ”How can time, which is placed outside eternity, bring him to eternity?” The answer is that it does not bring him there; it only educates him to look for, and prepares him to pass through, the opening through which he can escape. Need it be said that this lies at the point where ego surrenders wholly to Overself?
16.26.4.249 | • Listen | 27 Dec 2011 |
The Goal towards which man is slowly travelling by successive steps is a threefold one: the fully developed environment, the fully developed intelligence, and the realized soul. The last is the best and the other two are but servants of it, for here he comes first to a comprehension and then to a realization of himself. Yes, he is on his way to the grand awakening into full self-consciousness.
16.26.4.250 | • Listen | 19 Sep 2018 |
The journey of life is both an adventure and a pilgrimage. We pass from body to body to collect experience. The fruit of experience is Enlightenment: the knowledge of Overself, established awareness of its presence; and knowledge of the Unseen Power behind the universe, established connection with it.
16.26.4.254 | 24 Mar 2011 |
We are here in this world for a higher purpose than the obvious physical one of self-preservation, for even that is contributory to it. We are here to evolve into the consciousness of Overself. Every physical experience is only a means toward such spiritual development.
16.26.4.255 | • Listen | 24 Aug 2011 |
... The ego comes to slow birth in finite consciousness out of utter unconsciousness and, later, to recognition and union with its infinite source. That source, whence it has emanated, remains untouched, unaffected, ever knowing and serenely witnessing. The purpose in this evolution is the ego's own advancement. When the Quest is reached, the Overself reveals its presence fitfully and brokenly at first but later the hide-and-seek game ends in loving union.
16.26.4.256, Excerpt | • Listen | 7 Jul 2012 |
... The true teaching about reincarnation is not that the divine soul enters into the captivity and ignorance of the flesh again and again but that something emanated from the soul, that is, a unit of life that eventually develops into the personal ego, does so…
16.26.4.257, Excerpt | • Listen | 18 Aug 2011 |
... It is not the Overself that suffers and struggles during this long unfoldment but its child, the ego. It is not the Overself that slowly expands its intelligence and consciousness, but the ego. It is not the Overself that gets deluded by ignorance and passion, by selfishness and extroversion, but the ego…
16.26.4.257, Excerpt | • Listen | 21 Dec 2011 |
... The Overself never descends or climbs, never loses its own sublime consciousness. What really does this is something that emanates from it and that consequently holds its capacity and power in latency, something which is finited out of the Overself's infinitude and becomes first, the simple unit of life and later, the complex human ego…
16.26.4.257, Excerpt | • Listen | 21 Jan 2012 |
... The Infinite Being, whose Consciousness and Power is behind the universe of history, can itself have no history, for it is beyond time, evolution, change, development, can have no purpose which is gainful to itself, cannot be made the object of human thought correctly because it utterly transcends the limitations of such thought...
16.26.4.258, Excerpt | • Listen | 23 Aug 2016 |
We murmur against the world's obstructiveness to our aspirations: the body is our stumbling-block. Yet if we had to live always as disembodied spirits, our spiritual development would need an immeasurably longer time to accomplish itself. The sharper focus of physical consciousness quickens our pace.
16.26.4.263 | • Listen | 16 Jan 2013 |
Man, in his earlier phases of being, was connected with the Overself and aware of it. But his connection lacked his own control. Eventually, to fulfil the purpose of evolution, he lost this connection and with it his awareness. Now he has to regain the connection and reawaken this awareness by his own efforts and out of his own inner activity, through his own desiring and in his own individual freedom. What has he gained by this change to compensate the loss? His consciousness has become more sharply focused and consequently more clearly aware.
16.26.4.264 | • Listen | 17 Jan 2012 |
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