Day by day
The first feeling is one of astonishment that such a large area of knowledge and experience should exist among us humans and yet be almost unknown to most of us.
13.20.1.293Listen 1 Jul 2016At any given moment, a man thinks and acts according to, and as a result of, his whole mental and physical experience of life and his whole character and nature. These cannot be limited to the single short life on earth he now knows, for that will not explain many of his tendencies and traits. They must include all his previous lives.
6.9.2.20Listen 2 Jul 2016The fact that we know our bodies is a guarantee that we can know our souls. For the knowing principle in us is derived from the soul itself. We have only to search our own minds deeply enough and ardently enough to discover it.
14.22.5.14Listen 3 Jul 2016If grace had to depend solely on human merit, if it had to be fully worked for and earned, it would no longer be grace. It really depends on the mysterious will of the higher power. But this is not to say that it comes by the caprice of the higher power. If a man puts himself into a sufficiently receptive attitude, and if he applies the admonition ”Be still and know that I am God,” he is doing something to attract grace.
12.18.5.150Listen 4 Jul 2016The statement ”to be” is to be ”in time” or ”in timelessness.” Most limit its meaning to the first phrase only. But the more enlightened know that the higher possibility has been realized by some.
13.19.2.67Listen 5 Jul 2016The ”Void” means void of all mental activity and productivity. It means that the notions and images of the mind have been emptied out, that all perceptions of the body and conceptions of the brain have gone.
16.28.2.115Listen 6 Jul 2016What can you do in India that you cannot do in your own land? The same struggle against the passions, the emotions, and the ego which is taking place in the one country is taking place in the other. You cannot escape it by moving the body from one spot to a different one. What you have to achieve is within yourself...
10.15.1.83, ExcerptListen 7 Jul 2016The Overself is first and last felt or experienced as a deep peace within oneself. Hence the larger meaning of the greeting used in the Orient and in early Greek Mysteries that ”Peace be with you!”
15.24.4.12Listen 8 Jul 2016His conduct while alive will contribute to the kind of body and environment he gets next time, his thought and feelings too. We earn from life and pass up higher or go down lower like pupils in graded school.
6.9.2.101Listen 9 Jul 2016To be able to contemplate the Overself as an ”other” is already an achievement of high order. But because it is, first, an intermittent one, second, an incomplete one, and third, an imperfect one, it is not yet the highest. In the latter there is final, permanent, and perfect immersion in the Overself.
13.20.4.211Listen 10 Jul 2016To keep up the habit of daily meditation until we love it, is the way to success.
4.4.2.324Listen 11 Jul 2016The declaration of Jesus that whosoever will save his life shall lose it, is uncompromising. It is an eternal truth as well as a universal one... It means that the inexorable condition which the Overself imposes before it will reveal itself in all its beauty, its grandeur, its peace, and its power is that they should abnegate this unbalanced interest in the lower activities of this world in which they are so totally immersed...
6.8.4.230, ExcerptListen 12 Jul 2016The following of these exercises is indispensable to train the mind, to create a habit which will make entry into the meditative mood as easy in the end as it is hard in the beginning.
4.4.1.98Listen 13 Jul 2016No candidate could enter the King's Chamber and be initiated therein into the Greater Mysteries without stooping in emblematic submission beneath the low doorway at its entrance. For no man may attain adeptship without surrender of his personal egoism and his animal nature.
12.18.4.88Listen 14 Jul 2016It is not always and absolutely essential to remove from one's existence any thing, person, or habit to become detached from it. What is essential is to keep it at a distance emotionally.
3.2.7.8Listen 15 Jul 2016The universe comes, exists, goes, comes again, and repeats this cycle. Man does the same until he breaks the illusion of common experience and penetrates into the reality behind it all and behind himself.
13.19.1.1Listen 16 Jul 2016Even if the highest truth were to appear in all its glorious fullness before his mind, he would be unable to recognize it for what it is--much less understand it--if there had been no preparation or purification for it...
6.8.4.87, ExcerptListen 17 Jul 2016The ascending degrees of initiation into higher understanding of truth and large capacity to receive contemplative awareness open themselves to him one by one as he passes each successive test leading to it. These tests consist, in the lower grades, of willingness to submit physical habits, passions, and desires to discipline and, in higher grades, willingness to submit thoughts and feelings to it. In all, they lead to a progressive detachment from the animal and the ego.
2.1.5.317Listen 18 Jul 2016The disinclination to start practising meditation and the inability to sustain it for long when started are due in part to the mind's strong habit of being preoccupied with worldly matters or being attached to personal desires. This is why the study of wholly abstract metaphysical and impersonal topics is part of the Philosophic Path.
13.20.3.121Listen 19 Jul 2016He comes to see the whole cosmos as a manifestation of the Supreme Being. It follows that involuntarily, spontaneously, he brings himself--mind and body, heart and will--into harmony with this view.
16.26.1.222Listen 20 Jul 2016”Before Abraham was I am!” These words are an expression of the higher mentalism. Note carefully that Jesus did not say ”I was.” This means that he, as the non-personal unindividuated Mind, existed before the birth of Abraham. ”I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be.
16.28.1.87Listen 21 Jul 2016To acknowledge this Presence and this Power within him as continually or as often as he can, is a practice whose results are larger than its simplicity suggests.
15.23.6.151Listen 22 Jul 2016Memory creates for us the patterns, traditions, values, and habits by which we live. It is the dominant authority. But it is also the tyrant which keeps us captive and denies us freedom--a deprival which effectually prevents the finding of truth and effectually builds a barrier to reality. Anyone can remember the ego-coloured past in this way, but only the sage can forget it and dissolve all these patterns.
6.8.4.101Listen 23 Jul 2016Those who sincerely and intelligently live according to the philosophical ideal as best they can, surrendering the ego to the Overself continually, receive visible proof and wonderful demonstration of a higher presence and power in their lives. They can afford to trust God, for it is no blind trust.
12.18.4.192Listen 24 Jul 2016The man who found his divine soul will not, unless he is divinely enjoined to do so as part of a special beneficent mission, publicly advertise the fact.
15.24.4.199Listen 25 Jul 2016The ego stands in the way: its own presence annuls awareness of the presence of the Overself. But this need not be so. Correct and deeper understanding of what the self is, proper adjustment between the individual and the universal in consciousness, will bring enlightenment.
6.8.4.369Listen 26 Jul 2016The whole of philosophy cannot be disseminated quickly and easily to the masses. But this is not to be used as an excuse to do nothing at all for them.
13.20.2.49Listen 27 Jul 2016Because I am a conscious being I am aware of physical sensations and mental thoughts; but the consciousness which enables such awareness to exist itself existed before sensation and before thought, and this is as true of newborn babies as it is of dying men. This is what the materialistic anatomist dissecting the body fails to perceive...
13.21.2.175, ExcerptListen 28 Jul 2016No man is excluded from that first touch of Grace which puts him upon the Quest. All may receive it and, in the end, all do. But we see everywhere around us the abundant evidence that he will not be ready for it until he has had enough experience of the world, enough frustration and disappointment to make him pause and to make him humbler.
12.18.5.163Listen 29 Jul 2016There is no other way to discover the Pure Consciousness than the renunciation of thinking, then the willingness to go beyond it altogether.
15.23.7.180Listen 30 Jul 2016He should train himself in the Overself remembrance exercise (1) until it becomes quite easy and effortless, (2) until this inward concentration has been set in habitual motion, (3) until the remembrance continues of its own accord and (4) until its practice has become firmly and successfully established as ceaseless flow...
15.23.6.176, ExcerptListen 31 Jul 2016
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