The Library
- #12
- #13
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• Email • Listen - #26
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• Email • Listen - #31
- #36
- #38
- #40
- #41
- #42
- #43
- #44
- #47
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• Email • Listen - #54
… 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,• Email • Listen - #55
- #56
- #63
... 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,• Email • Listen - #73
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• Email • Listen - #74
- #82
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• Email • Listen - #84
- #86
- #90
- #91
- #94
- #98
- #105
- #109
- #112
- #115
- #121
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• Email • Listen - #123
... 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,• Email • Listen - #123
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,• Email • Listen - #140
- #146
- #170
- #174
- #175
- #180
- #181
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• Email - #182
- #185
- #188
- #201
- #214
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• Email - #215
- #216
It is easier to transform a wilderness into a garden flourishing with plants and flowers than to transform humanity into a spiritual race. But time and life, evolution and experience will all combine to do it. The movement up to higher levels will be slow and painful, the maturation of human character retarded and halting, but they will be sure because they are written in the fate of man.
16.26.4.216• Email • Listen - #218
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• Email • Listen - #220
- #221
- #233
- #236
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• Email • Listen - #237
- #238
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• Email • Listen - #242
- #247
- #249
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• Email • Listen - #250
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• Email • Listen - #253
- #254
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• Email - #255
- #256
... 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,• Email • Listen - #257
- #257
... 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,• Email • Listen - #257
... 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,• Email • Listen - #257
- #257
- #257
… the highest form is hidden away in the lowest one. There is development from the blindly instinctive life of animals to the consciously thinking life of man. The blind instinctive struggles of the plant to sustain itself are displaced in the evolutionary process by the intelligent self-conscious efforts of the man…
16.26.4.257,• Email • Listen - #258
... 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,• Email • Listen - #263
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• Email • Listen - #264
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• Email • Listen - #265
- #266
29 Jan 2019
29 Jan 2012
4 Jun 2011
13 Dec 2013
24 Dec 2017
11 Jul 2011
24 Jun 2018
20 May 2017
20 Jun 2018
21 Mar 2013
4 Jul 2019
6 May 2017
7 Jun 2017
8 Mar 2013
12 Mar 2013
6 Feb 2012
27 Apr 2013
8 Apr 2012
2 Jan 2012
13 Apr 2018
29 Nov 2019
28 Nov 2017
25 May 2012
7 Aug 2012
28 Jun 2017
4 Nov 2017
24 Jul 2019
29 May 2012
31 Jul 2019
8 Apr 2013
13 Jun 2012
15 Oct 2017
18 Nov 2012
5 Oct 2012
14 Jul 2012
31 Oct 2017
4 May 2020
24 Jun 2012
30 Dec 2010
10 Mar 2018
20 Jul 2019
3 Dec 2016
15 Aug 2017
23 May 2011
10 Oct 2013
26 Feb 2020
5 May 2015
9 Aug 2012
23 Jan 2018
1 Nov 2013
17 Apr 2017
25 Oct 2016
12 Jan 2012
26 Jul 2018
25 Nov 2011
27 Dec 2011
19 Sep 2018
14 Dec 2011
24 Mar 2011
24 Aug 2011
7 Jul 2012
18 Aug 2011
21 Dec 2011
21 Jan 2012
4 Nov 2012
2 Oct 2016
18 Sep 2020
23 Aug 2016
16 Jan 2013
17 Jan 2012
5 Dec 2017
3 Dec 2011
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