Day by day
The Overself is not merely a pleasant feeling--although it arouses such a feeling--but a veritable force. When it possesses a man, he is literally and actually gripped by a dynamic energy. A creative power henceforth pervades his atmosphere, enters his deeds, permeates his mind and charges his words, and runs through his history.
14.22.2.113Listen 1 Jun 2011To give up the “I” is very hard, yet that is our one and only task. The right attitude eclipses the ego and brings peace, whereas the wrong attitude enhances the ego and brings pain...
3.2.3.29, ExcerptListen 2 Jun 2011With a glimpse comes revelation. He feels that he belongs to an immortal race, that there is an inner Reality behind all things, and that the ultimate source is a beneficent one.
14.22.6.369Listen 3 Jun 2011No 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.
16.26.4.26Listen 4 Jun 2011This is the amazing contradiction of man's life, that although bearing the divine within himself, he is aware only of, and pursues unabated, its very opposite.
6.8.1.15Listen 5 Jun 2011The appearance of the sacred presence automatically extinguishes the lower desires. The holding on to that presence wherever he goes and whatever he does as if it were his real identity, will help to establish that release as a lasting fact.
14.22.3.101Listen 6 Jun 2011...Even a few years' study of philosophy will bring definite benefit into the life of a student. It will help him in all sorts of ways, unconsciously, here on earth and it will help him very definitely after death during his life in the next world of being.
2.1.5.416, ExcerptListen 7 Jun 2011Thoughts rise and fall on the surface of consciousness just like waves on the ocean. Both thoughts and waves disappear again into their source. The ego is a totality of strongly held thoughts with a long ancestry behind them. So it too dissolves into the universal mind...
6.8.1.114, ExcerptListen 8 Jun 2011Letting go all thoughts--the ego-thought, the world-thought, even the God-thought--until absolutely none is present in mind: it is as simple as that!
15.23.7.226Listen 9 Jun 2011Everything else can be known, as things and ideas are known, as something apart or possessed, but the Overself cannot be truly known in this way. Only by identifying oneself with It can this happen.
14.22.3.191Listen 10 Jun 2011Whatever you do to work upon the ego, whether you remove this weakness or improve that faculty, it will always be ego and your consciousness will always remain within its tightly closed circle. In the time you give to such work you could be occupying yourself with thought of the non-ego, the Overself, and dwelling in this thought until the sunshine behind it bursts through and you bask in the glory.
15.23.4.64Listen 11 Jun 2011One of life's objectives is to develop in us these aesthetic feelings, for they lead to the Overself.
9.14.1.37Listen 12 Jun 2011A double work goes on: the man slowly withdraws from the things which hold him, which make him theirs, while his higher aspirations attract the higher self to slowly take over the place in his heart which they filled.
3.2.7.27Listen 13 Jun 2011Man begins his search for the highest Truth with his ego and rises to its higher and higher levels, but in the end he must leave the ego if the Truth is to be found. The manner of finding truth is such that he must leave the ego's limitations and look to its origin, its universal source.
6.8.4.41Listen 14 Jun 2011If you ask what reality is, in philosophy's view, the answer must be consciousness. If you further ask what man's work in this life is, the answer must be to become conscious of consciousness as such. But because, ordinarily, consciousness never discloses itself to him but only its varying states, he can accomplish this work only by adopting extraordinary means. He will have to steel his feelings and still his mind. In short, he will have to deny himself.
13.20.3.155Listen 15 Jun 2011The gardener who waters his flowers and shrubs with loving patience receives love from them in return. It is not like the human kind, but is the exact correspondence to it on the plant level.
3.3.6.54Listen 16 Jun 2011The twofold way is indispensable: on the one hand the way of self-effort, working to overcome the ego, and on the other the way of Grace, through constantly seeking to remember your true identity in the Overself.
15.23.5.193Listen 17 Jun 2011The changeover to the Short Path calls for a tremendous leap from his present standpoint--whatever that may happen to be--to the highest possible one.
15.23.1.41Listen 18 Jun 2011Although it is quite correct to say that we grow through experience, that suffering has valuable lessons, and so on, we must also remember that these are only half-truths. The other half is that by Short Path identifications, we can so totally change our outlook that adverse experience becomes unnecessary.
15.23.5.85Listen 19 Jun 2011Philosophy explains life, guides man, and--by removing his misunderstanding about his own identity--redeems him.
13.20.1.170Listen 20 Jun 2011It is a common experience that in shady woodland walks there is an effluence of peace in the atmosphere. We need not wonder that in such and kindred places it is easier to find the quietness within. It is true that men have found their way to the Overself in almost every kind of environment, but there was more help and less conflict when they were alone with primeval Nature.
3.3.6.44Listen 21 Jun 2011... It is not annihilation that we ought to fear, for that will not happen, but rather the evil in our own self, and the pain that follows in the train of that evil as a shadow follows a man in the sunlight.
6.9.1.58, ExcerptListen 22 Jun 2011The faculty of attention is interiorized and turned back upon itself.
15.23.7.216Listen 23 Jun 2011In this wonderful atmosphere of unimaginable intense peace, all that was negative in the past years is effaced so radically that it becomes as nothing.
15.24.4.116Listen 24 Jun 2011Give the ego back to the Overself and then the Overself will use it as it should be used--in harmony with the cosmic laws of being. This means that the welfare of all others in contact with the ego will be considered as well as the ego's own.
14.22.2.49Listen 25 Jun 2011No glimpse is ever full and complete. If it were, the person experiencing it would be unable to fall into spiritual ignorance again. From this we may understand that however wonderful a glimpse of the Overself may be, it is still only a cloudy reflection of the real thing.
14.22.8.48Listen 26 Jun 2011To live in the ego is to live in time, to live in the Overself is to live in timelessness. But because man must live in both to live on earth at all, let him learn the art of resting in the eternal Now, the continuing moment which opens on to eternity.
13.19.2.64Listen 27 Jun 2011The divine spirit is always there in man, has always been there; but until he cultivates his capacity to become aware of it, it might as well be non-existent for him.
2.1.5.8Listen 28 Jun 2011If the turning wheel of thoughts can be brought to a perfect standstill without paying the penalty of sleep, the results will be that the Thinker will come to know himself instead of his thoughts.
4.4.3.3Listen 29 Jun 2011The attention must be concentrated at this stage solely on the hidden soul. No other aim and even no symbol of It may now be held. When he has become so profoundly absorbed in this contemplation that his whole being, his whole psyche of thought, feeling, will, and intuition are mingled and blent in it, there may come suddenly and unexpectedly a displacement of awareness. He actually passes out of what he has hitherto known as himself into a new dimension and becomes a different being...
15.23.7.321, ExcerptListen 30 Jun 2011
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