Day by day
The proud heart of man must be humbled before the Overself will reveal itself to him.
12.18.3.14Listen 1 Mar 2016It would be wrong to believe that there are two separate minds, two independent consciousnesses within us--one the lower ego-mind, and the other, the higher Overself-mind--with one, itself unwatched, watching the other. There is but one independent illuminating mind and everything else is only a limited and reflected image within it. The ego is a thought-series dependent on it.
6.8.1.74Listen 2 Mar 2016I will never tire of telling men that the Overself is as loving as any parent and that it does care for our real welfare. But we must return that love, must give our unconditional devotion, if we are to have a correct relationship with it.
12.18.1.15Listen 3 Mar 2016The body's surface organs explain the nature and reveal the qualities of things in our environment. But without the mind such explanation and such revelation could never be possible. This is easily proven. When we withdraw the mind from the sense-organs, as in deep thinking or profound remembrance, we alienate the environment and hardly observe the things in it. In other words, we sense ultimately only what the mind senses.
13.21.1.36Listen 4 Mar 2016The man who wins is the man whose dice are loaded with invincible optimism, with unfailing effort, and with creative thought.
6.9.4.119Listen 5 Mar 2016When the personal ego's thoughts and desires are stripped off, we behold ourselves as we were in the first state and as we shall be in the final one. We are then the Overself alone, in its Godlike solitude and stillness.
15.24.4.1Listen 6 Mar 2016All his longings to escape from the prison of the ego and to reach the I AM in himself reflect themselves in his experiments with drink, drugs, sex, adventure, or ambition.
6.8.4.360Listen 7 Mar 2016No one can know in advance how long it will stay with him. It is here out of nowhere and nowhen, and then gone away the next hour. The visitation may or may not be repeated but because it is nothing that he has achieved, the repetition is outside his reach to control. Thus begins a lifelong haunting by what becomes his dearest wish--to repeat, and especially to continue in, this magical transformation.
14.22.7.89Listen 8 Mar 2016... The God Who is to be found within ourselves must also exist equally outside ourselves in the phenomenal universe, else how would He be Infinite...?
13.20.1.325, ExcerptListen 9 Mar 2016Psychological methods are not less necessary than religious exercises. The thought-life of man is ordinarily a confused, a wandering, and a restless one. Meditation, practised in solitude and quietude, must be regularly inserted into it, first, to help improve its character, and second, to open a pathway towards conscious knowledge of the higher self.
4.4.1.44Listen 10 Mar 2016When the hour comes to desert the body, he will be ready for the fated event, without that desperate struggle to hold on to a form which has served its purpose seen too often in the ignorant.
16.25.3.285Listen 11 Mar 2016... The disciplining of the self can go on and on and on. There will be no end to it. For the ego will always be able to find ways to keep the aspirant busy in self-improvement, thus blinding him to the fact that the self is still there behind all his improvements. For why should the ego kill itself? Yet the enlightenment which is the goal he strives to reach can never be obtained unless the ego ceases to bar the way to it. At this discovery he will have no alternative to, and will be quite ready for, the Short Path.
15.23.4.119, ExcerptListen 12 Mar 2016If the past is unredeemable, and the future unpredictable, what more practical course is open than to safeguard the present by constant remembrance of the divine?
15.23.6.158Listen 13 Mar 2016The method of the Short Path is to affirm that in the heavenly consciousness of the Overself there is no evil, no wrong-doing, no sinfulness, and no faultiness; and that because the true being of man is there the aspirant should identify himself with it...
15.23.6.129, ExcerptListen 14 Mar 2016... The personal self did not emerge from nothing and therefore cannot go back into nothing when it dies; it dies into this living Universal Mind, is absorbed by it.
6.8.1.114, ExcerptListen 15 Mar 2016The divine essence is Unknowable to the finite intellect, but knowable, in a certain sense, by the deepest intuition. And this sense can arise to the man previously prepared by instruction and purification, or by studied knowledge and purification, if he puts away thoughts, even those about the essence, or lets them lapse of their own accord, and awaits its self-disclosure patiently, reverently, lovingly--three conditions of high importance.
16.28.2.90Listen 16 Mar 2016If we respectfully meet each intuitive feeling and give it our trusting collaboration, it will little by little become a frequent visitor.
14.22.1.95Listen 17 Mar 2016Even those who are well-intentioned and spiritually minded make many mistakes in life simply because they cannot see the unfortunate results to which their wrong decisions and actions must necessarily lead. Only experience can lead to their correction and only reincarnation can give enough experience.
6.9.2.226Listen 18 Mar 2016... The Overself remembrance should be held in the back of the mind, even though he may appear to be properly attentive to external matters...
15.23.6.176, ExcerptListen 19 Mar 2016It comes to this, that we have to learn the art of doing nothing! It would seem that everyone could practise this without the slightest preparation or training, but the fact is that hardly anyone can do so. For the expression doing nothing must be interpreted in an absolute sense. We must learn to be totally without action, without thought--without any tension or manifestation of the ego. The Biblical expression Be still! says exactly the same thing but says it positively where the other says it negatively. If we really succeed in learning this art, and sit absolutely still for long periods of time, we shall be given the best of all rewards, the one promised by the Bible: we shall ”know that I am God.”
15.23.7.258Listen 20 Mar 2016The best meditation in forgetting our personal miseries is the meditation on the Void. For if we succeed in it to only a partial degree, we succeed to that extent in forgetting the ego, who also is the sufferer, and his miseries vanish with it.
15.23.8.124Listen 21 Mar 2016This earthly life is the ”narrow gate” which opens onto the kingdom.
9.13.2.185Listen 22 Mar 2016... The Overself remembrance exercise has a peculiar potency of its own despite its informal and unprogrammed character...
15.23.6.176, ExcerptListen 23 Mar 2016... His task is one of the oldest in human history--to convince men and women that it is worthwhile asking themselves: What are the ultimate values of human life?
13.20.4.275, ExcerptListen 24 Mar 2016Who is willing to sacrifice his worldly interests for the sake of coming closer to the intangible Overself...?
12.17.6.157, ExcerptListen 25 Mar 2016When self-absorption is somewhat advanced and concentration fairly steady, we are ready for the third stage, contemplation. Here, personal effort should cease. An intuition will gently make itself manifest and the moment it does we must let it affect us by being as inwardly submissive as possible. If we can follow it up, it will increase in strength and clearness... As it develops, some ethereal presence seems to come over us, a diviner happier nobler self than your common one. An ethereal feeling will echo throughout your inner being. It seems to come from some far-off world yet it will be like some mysterious half-remembered music in its paradoxical mixture of strangeness and familiarity. We are then on the threshold of that in us which links us with God.
15.23.7.197, ExcerptListen 26 Mar 2016Everything seems lost to a man when he surrenders his own personal will deep in his heart to the higher self, when he abandons his personal aims, wishes, and purposes at its bidding. Yet the truth is that only then is everything gained.
6.8.4.458Listen 27 Mar 2016The sage can condemn nobody, can regard none as outside his range of compassion, and can find a place in his heart for the worst sinner. He knows that duality is but a dream and discovers himself anew in all sentient creatures. He knows that the world's woe arises out of its false and fictitious sense of separateness.
16.25.3.288Listen 28 Mar 2016On the Short Path, instead of attacking the lower self, he lifts himself up to the presence of the higher. The evil in him may then melt away of its own accord.
15.23.1.132Listen 29 Mar 2016Wherever human consciousness exists, wherever there is a thinker, there are also his thoughts. Subject and object join to make conscious existence of an ego, an ”I,” possible, both in waking and dream states.
6.8.2.72Listen 30 Mar 2016What does getting rid of the ego's dominance mean? Until we see this clearly, we shall not see what effort we have to make to achieve it. First, it means constant training to regard ourself and our fortunes as coolly, disinterestedly, and impartially as we regard other men and their fortunes. Second, it means constant vigilance to keep out the distorting, befogging, and perverting interference of personal habits of thought and feeling. It is the blind following of these tendencies of our nature, accumulated since a far past, that makes up most of the ego's life. Third, it means constant practice in repressing thoughts and emotions while cultivating mental stillness.
0.2.4.21Listen 31 Mar 2016
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