Day by day
Make sure what you really want before you go after it. The bitter experience in life is to find after years of effort that the thing you have gained is not the thing you want.
5.6.4.83Listen 1 Jul 2020The dominant habits, regimes, and practices of the regular routine which modern Western man follows show in themselves how far he has lost the true purposes of living, how disproportionate is the emphasis he has put on the things of this world.
3.3.2.15Listen 2 Jul 2020It is for him to do whatever practical wisdom calls for in each situation but, having done that, to relinquish the results to the higher power for better or for worse.
12.18.4.68Listen 3 Jul 2020He feels that a newer and other self is coming to birth.
15.23.4.66Listen 4 Jul 2020Those who depend solely on the Short Path without being totally ready for it take too much for granted and make too much of a demand. This is arrogance. Instead of opening the door, such an attitude can only close it tighter. Those who depend solely on the Long Path take too much on their shoulders and burden themselves with a purificatory work which not even an entire lifetime can bring to an end. This is futility. It causes them to evolve at a slower rate…
15.23.5.159, ExcerptListen 5 Jul 2020Only in those last few days or hours or minutes do most men find out the truth that as one kind of life leaves both them and their flesh, another opens up to them.
6.9.1.123Listen 6 Jul 2020When the incantatory words of a mantra by constant practice become fully activated, the mantra becomes fully automatic and circles round and round inside the head or the heart just like a revolving wheel. At this deep stage, he is not concerned with its translated or verbal meaning but only with the kind of consciousness it produces. For now it is not a matter of what he is doing but of what is being done to him. The mantra has brought him into a region of released forces which are very active in him.
4.4.6.43Listen 7 Jul 2020The true unchanging self is apart from any historical era and is not dependent on outer changes of custom and form.
14.22.3.373Listen 8 Jul 2020… there is no attempt at self-improvement, self-purification, or mind-training here; nor any aspiration, or longing. It is a calm movement into the Silent Universal Mind, without personal aims.
15.23.7.231, ExcerptListen 9 Jul 2020The aspirant who seeks to live spiritually in the world should marry for something more than physical enjoyment and comfort, more even than intellectual and social companionship. He must find a woman whose inner being is polarized to the same ideals as his own, who will walk by his side through every vicissitude as a fellow-pilgrim and a wholehearted seeker.
5.6.2.234Listen 10 Jul 2020The Short Path not only requires him to turn his attention in the Overself's direction but also to maintain it there.
15.23.6.235Listen 11 Jul 2020It is always hard to watch others who are near and dear to him suffer, but he must not let go of his own inner faith and peace, however little they be, because of having to witness such suffering. It ought not to take him by surprise if he remembers that earthly life is usually a mixture of pleasure and pain, and that only in the Overself is there lasting happiness.
15.24.1.108Listen 12 Jul 2020The idea that a man's own virtue can bring him to the goal belongs to the Long Path.
15.23.2.153Listen 13 Jul 2020The capacity to give and receive love is not to be destroyed, nor can it be. Nature has planted its roots too deeply for that destruction to be attempted with success or desired with wisdom. But the man or woman who aspires to the highest cannot let it stay ungrown and benefit from its finest fruits. He should nurture it, purify it, exalt it, and spiritualize it. He should direct it toward his best self, his Overself, aspiring and yearning. And when it comes back to him in the blessed form of Grace, he should be ready and fit to receive it.
5.6.2.94Listen 14 Jul 2020There is no better way to bring the body under control than the way used to bring the mind under control--to put it under a daily routine of exercises and to have a fixed time for their repeated practice.
4.5.5.4Listen 15 Jul 2020During such meditations the place around may seem to be filled to overflowing with a sense of the divine presence.
15.23.7.26Listen 16 Jul 2020He must put down the lower emotions every time they rear their heads. The ordinary unquesting man may allow resentment, jealousy, anger, lust, hate, and greed to appear and act without restraint on the scene of his life, but the disciple cannot. Self-purification is both his need and his duty.
3.2.1.107Listen 17 Jul 2020These great truths require great humility in a man to receive them. The bigoted and the prejudiced lack it.
12.18.3.52Listen 18 Jul 2020There is a guiding conscience in a man which develops or weakens as he responds to the forces and influences playing on and in him from both bygone lives and the current incarnation. It is this preoccupation with choosing good and avoiding evil, with religious feelings and moral virtues, that lift man above the animal.
5.6.1.337Listen 19 Jul 2020In that moment man has come to himself. Before then he has been dwelling in alien things, in his passions, his thoughts, his emotions, and his desires.
14.22.6.276Listen 20 Jul 2020Grace does not depend on God's intervention in any favouritistic or arbitrary manner. It is not an effect of God's whim or caprice. It falls like sunlight on all, the good and evil alike. Each individual can receive it, according to the quantity of obstacles he removes from its path.
12.18.5.26Listen 21 Jul 2020When he finds that he can go no farther by himself, the time has come to look within for more grace or to look without for more guidance. He needs the one to get away from his own selfishness or the other to get away from his own darkness.
2.1.3.252Listen 22 Jul 2020What has happened has happened and there is nothing we can do about it… But if the past records cannot be changed, our present attitudes towards them can be changed. We can learn lessons from the past, we can apply wisdom to it, we can try to improve ourselves and our acts, we can create new and better karma. Best of all, having done all these things, we can let go of the past entirely and learn to live in the eternal now by escaping into true Being, the I am consciousness, not the I was.
6.9.3.551, ExcerptListen 23 Jul 2020The view that karma operates like an automatic machine is not a wholly true one; this is because it is not a wholly complete one. The missing element is grace.
6.9.3.570Listen 24 Jul 2020It is useful to follow out the mantram system of meditation when the ordinary systems, involving set exercises and formal periods, have been tried and found profitless.
4.4.6.86Listen 25 Jul 2020It is not enough to try to secure peace between the nations. We must also try to secure it between men and animals by ceasing to slaughter them.
5.6.7.8Listen 26 Jul 2020… some of the confusion is due to the fact that the ego is a changing thing; it changes with time and experience, whereas the Infinite Being, the Ultimate, is changeless …
6.8.1.190, ExcerptListen 27 Jul 2020There is one method whereby the treasures found in meditation may be brought, little by little, into the active state. This is to try to recollect, at odd times during the day, the peace, bliss, strength, or truth, or any messages gleaned during the best moments of the preceding meditation. The more often this is done, the sooner will the gap between meditation and activity be bridged.
15.23.6.191Listen 28 Jul 2020The complexes and tendencies pre-existing the present birth and hidden deep in his subconscious mind, must sooner or later come through to the surface mind.
6.9.2.30Listen 29 Jul 2020For the brief period in which it prevails, the glimpse destroys the ego's dominance.
14.22.6.271Listen 30 Jul 2020Because he has been once illumined, the darkness can never again be total darkness. He will know that the possibility of light flashing across it always exists.
14.22.7.88Listen 31 Jul 2020
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