Day by day
This constant remembrance of the higher self becomes in time like a kind of holy communion.
15.23.6.214Listen 1 Jan 2012If 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.
16.26.4.82Listen 2 Jan 2012... If he has ever had a glimpse of a supersensuous higher existence which profoundly impressed him and perhaps led him to take to the quest, it is most important that he should also insert the remembrance of this experience into his exercise. He should try to bring as vividly as possible to his mind the sense of peace and exaltation which he then felt.
15.23.6.176, ExcerptListen 3 Jan 2012A valuable practice of the Short Path is to see himself already enjoying the realization of its goal, already partaking of its glorious rewards. This is a visualizing exercise in which his own face confronts him, a smiling triumphant face, a calm peaceful face. It is to be done as many times every day as he can remember to do it.
15.23.6.50Listen 4 Jan 2012Even while you share in the life, the work, and the pleasures of this world, learn also to stand aside as a witness of them all. Learn how to be a spectator as well as a participator; in short, let detachment accompany your involvement, or rather let it hide secretly behind the other…
15.24.3.1, ExcerptListen 5 Jan 2012Each individual has quite enough to do to carry out the higher purpose of life, which is clear and definite: to attain awareness of the Overself, to surrender the heart and will to it utterly, and to overcome the ego--which, in itself, calls for the whole nature of a man or a woman.
3.2.4.45Listen 6 Jan 2012It is one secret of the inspired individual that he lets himself be led: he does not try to do with his ego what can be better done for him by the intuition. But this will be possible only if he pauses and waits for the inner leading to come to him.
14.22.2.48Listen 7 Jan 2012The surrender to the Overself must not be misinterpreted as surrender to lethargy, to lack of initiative, or to absence of effort. It means that before initiative rises and before effort is made, a man will first look to the Overself for inspiration. When such inner guidance and rational thinking speak with united voice, then he can go forward with a plan, a faith, or a deed, sure and unafraid and confident.
12.18.4.50Listen 8 Jan 2012The unfoldment of intuitive action, intuitive thinking, and intuitive feeling means that the Overself and the personality are then in accord and working together…
14.22.2.72, ExcerptListen 9 Jan 2012It is the poor ego which worries and struggles to come closer to perfection. But how can the imperfect ever transform itself into the perfect? Let it cease its worry and simply surrender itself to the ever-perfect Overself.
12.18.4.112Listen 10 Jan 2012It is not enough to uncover his faults and confess his weaknesses, not even enough to correct the one and remedy the other. After all, these things concern only the stage of development he has already reached, and the ego only. He must also turn toward higher stages and also the egoless self.
15.23.2.147Listen 11 Jan 2012Human 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?
16.26.4.238Listen 12 Jan 2012He can repudiate the man that he was in the past... He can liberate himself from all the old images of himself and assume a new one, become a new man. For he can turn his back on all these ego-regarding attitudes and transfer his thoughts, his self-identification, to the Overself.
15.23.1.54, ExcerptListen 13 Jan 2012The novice must be warned that certain ways of practising concentration, such as visualizing diagrams or repeating declarations, as well as emptying the mind to seek guidance, must not be confused with the true way of meditation. This has no other object than to surrender the ego to the Overself and uses no other method than prayerful aspiration, loving devotion, and mental quiet.
4.4.1.131Listen 14 Jan 2012So immense is the security which the Overself enfolds him with that he will not hesitate to take chances which prudence, caution, discretion, or fear would never take. But he will do so only if the Overself guides him to.
14.22.2.93Listen 15 Jan 2012It could well be said that the essence of the Short Path is remembering who he is, what he is, and then attending to this memory as often as possible.
15.23.6.184Listen 16 Jan 2012Man, 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.
16.26.4.264Listen 17 Jan 2012How long should a man practise this remembrance of the Overself? He will need to practise it so long as he needs to struggle with his ego.
15.23.6.155Listen 18 Jan 2012These brief flashes bring with them great joy, great beauty, and great uplift. They are, for most people, their first clear vivid awakening to the existence and reality of a spiritual order of being. The contrast with their ordinary state is so tremendous as to shame it into pitiful drabness…
14.22.4.3, ExcerptListen 19 Jan 2012When we realize that the intellect can put forth as many arguments against this theme as for it, we realize that there is in the end only one perfect proof of the Overself's existence. The Overself must prove itself. This can come about faintly through the intuition or fully through the mystical experience.
14.22.3.410Listen 20 Jan 2012... 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, ExcerptListen 21 Jan 2012How does the quest remove his fears? By providing him sooner or later with firm assurance that the Overself's gracious power is not only illuminative but also protective.
2.1.5.380Listen 22 Jan 2012Be present at your thinking and breathing and feeling and doing. This is what the Buddha called ”mindfulness.” But the highest possible form of mindfulness is to be present with the Overself for, after all, the other four are concerned with the ego, even though they are attempts to free yourself from it; but here it concerns that which completely transcends the ego.
15.23.6.236Listen 23 Jan 2012To the man of insight there is something strange, ironic, and yet pathetic in the spectacle of those who turn the consciousness and the understanding derived from Overself against the acknowledgment of Its existence.
14.22.3.422Listen 24 Jan 2012The Overself is not merely a transient intellectual abstraction but rather an eternal presence. For those who have awakened to the consciousness of this presence, there is always available its mysterious power and sublime inspiration.
14.22.2.69Listen 25 Jan 2012... He must refuse to follow the common error and identify himself with this one physical body of the present incarnation. Rather, he must identify himself with his mental being and feel this as something immortal, something reappearing on earth time after time and coming closer and closer, with each appearance, to the goal…
3.2.3.172, ExcerptListen 26 Jan 2012Our attachment to the ego is natural. It arises because we are unconsciously attached to that which is behind it, to the Overself. Only, we are misled by ignorance wholly to concentrate on the apparent “I” and wholly to ignore the unseen, enduring self of which it is but a transient shadow. The “I” which trembles or enjoys in the time-series is not the real “I.”
6.8.2.18Listen 27 Jan 2012The power to commune with the Overself is within us all, but most do not trouble to exert themselves in the nurture and cultivation of it. Hence they do not possess it in actuality.
3.2.6.49Listen 28 Jan 2012Although 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.
16.26.4.13Listen 29 Jan 2012... All mental concepts of God have to be discarded in the end. No dogmatic statement can hold the truth as it is: we merely get from the statement something to satisfy the intellect. For the Real is ineffable, that is, undescribable and untouchable by the ordinary finite capacity of humans. But because there is something godlike, somewhere, in man, intuition may reveal it.
16.27.0.2, ExcerptListen 30 Jan 2012He who has taken many births has a great wealth of total experience behind him. This manifests itself naturally in wiser decisions and better self-control.
6.9.2.65Listen 31 Jan 2012
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