Day by day
… less preoccupation with his own ego and more with the Overself is what he really needs. This is the same as saying that the Long Path work now needs balancing with Short Path work.
15.23.4.52, ExcerptListen 1 Sep 2020Each person's life is coloured by his individual attitude. This is shaped by the ego and limits both his experience and his understanding of life …
6.8.4.396, ExcerptListen 2 Sep 2020Being guided intuitively does not mean that every problem will be solved instantly as soon as it appears. Some solutions will not come into consciousness until almost the very last minute before they are actually needed. He learns to be patient, to let the higher power take its own course.
14.22.1.8Listen 3 Sep 2020It would be a grave mistake to believe that the following of ascetic regimes and the stilling of wandering thoughts causes the higher consciousness to supervene. What they really do is to permit it to supervene. Desires and distraction are hindrances to its attainment and they merely remove the hindrances. This makes possible the recognition of what we really are beneath them. If however we do nothing more than this, which is called yoga, we get only an inferior attainment, often only a temporary one. For unless we also engage in the rooting out of the ego, which is called philosophy, we do not get the final and superior transcendental state.
11.16.2.258Listen 4 Sep 2020We are to discipline, and when necessary abstain from satisfying, the lower impulses of our nature because we are to cultivate its higher intuitions. The clamant voice of the one drowns the soft whisper of the other.
5.6.4.170Listen 5 Sep 2020He has extended his consciousness to the Overself, displaced the ego from its age-old tyranny, and become the full human he intended to be.
13.20.5.10Listen 6 Sep 2020When he has reached this stage he will begin to understand that his further spiritual progress does not impose special acts such as disciplinary regimes and meditation exercises--excellent and necessary though these were in their place as preparatory work--but requires him simply to stand aside and be an observing witness of life, including his own life.
15.23.4.140Listen 7 Sep 2020In prayer we are trying to speak to God. In meditation we are trying to let God speak to us …
12.18.2.181, ExcerptListen 8 Sep 2020What man has more than partial freedom? All men have to receive the come-back of past activities, although the wise and disciplined ones may counter it to some extent by new actions.
6.9.3.515Listen 9 Sep 2020He will feel spontaneous peace that comes from he knows not where, intellectual conviction that the right path has been found, mysterious detachment that takes hold of him during worldly temptations and worldly tribulations alike.
14.22.6.108Listen 10 Sep 2020Compassion is the highest moral value, the noblest human feeling, the purest creature-love. It is the final social expression of man's divine soul…
5.6.2.131, ExcerptListen 11 Sep 2020OM means ”I am part of (or one with) the World-Soul.”
4.4.6.24Listen 12 Sep 2020The ego is always in hiding and often in disguise. It is a cunning creature, never showing its own face, so that even the man who wants to destroy its rule is easily tricked into attacking everything else but the ego! Therefore, the first (as well as the final) essential piece of knowledge needed to track it down to its secret lair is how to recognize and identify it.
6.8.4.391Listen 13 Sep 2020If the intercourse of man and woman is the most intimate act in the lives of both, the conscious contact of a human being with the Overself is even more intimate still.
14.22.6.134Listen 14 Sep 2020The man who finds God within himself feels no need to pray to a God who is to be sought and addressed outside himself.
12.18.2.203Listen 15 Sep 2020Can one man transfer spiritual grace to another? If by grace is meant here can he give a glimpse of the Overself to another, the answer is Yes!--if the other is worthy, sensitive, and above all karmically ready. He can if the other man is capable of absorbing the stimulus radiated to him.
16.25.4.64Listen 16 Sep 2020That which separates a man from others, which makes him a person, an individual being, is his ego.
6.8.1.150Listen 17 Sep 2020… the highest form is hidden away in the lowest one. There is development from the blindly instinctive life of animals to the consciously thinking life of man. The blind instinctive struggles of the plant to sustain itself are displaced in the evolutionary process by the intelligent self-conscious efforts of the man…
16.26.4.257, ExcerptListen 18 Sep 2020The closer he comes to the source of his being, the farther he goes from depression and despair.
15.24.2.168Listen 19 Sep 2020… he knows that his history did not begin in the country where he was born. He knows that it will not end in the body in which he dies.
6.9.2.217, ExcerptListen 20 Sep 2020The work of the Long Path is to loathe and remove the ego's sins; that of the Short Path is to love and receive the Overself's grace.
15.23.5.114Listen 21 Sep 2020For the man who has a strong ego, the religious approach with its cultivation of humility, its confession of sinfulness, and its redirection of emotion away from personality is the best to be recommended, if accompanied by some of the Philosophical Discipline's restrictions of the ego. However, such a person usually refuses to drink the medicines he most needs and therefore continues to remain involved in troubles of his own creation.
12.18.3.69Listen 22 Sep 2020The most important questions which a man can ask himself — What he is and What he is here for — must be answered before his life finds its proper course…
2.1.1.126, ExcerptListen 23 Sep 2020It is not any kind of activity of the ego which brings salvation. How could that happen? How can a man lift himself up by the hair upon his own head? Just the same he cannot touch the Overself spirit by his own virtue. It is only the activity of the Overself which will save him from the ego. But this he must provoke or invoke by taking to the Short Path.
15.23.2.155Listen 24 Sep 2020The ego will not end its existence but it will end its dominance.
6.8.1.184Listen 25 Sep 2020The illuminated man's conduct in this world is a guided one. His senses tell him what is happening in the world about him, but his soul guides him to a proper evaluation of those sense reports. In this way he lives in the world, but is not of it. Of him alone is it true to say that his is a spiritual life.
16.25.3.166Listen 26 Sep 2020Animals live in the herd instinct. They do not possess self-consciousness as individualized human beings possess it, nor have they the capacity of aspiring to what is above their own level. But they are subject to evolution and will ultimately arrive at our level …
4.4.3.58, ExcerptListen 27 Sep 2020Man is made in God's image in the sense that he latently possesses certain godlike qualities. But these have to be developed by evolution, which can be slow, through the path of normal experience, or swift, through the Quest.
2.1.2.457Listen 28 Sep 2020By starting to live from the core itself, we start to live harmoniously, undivided and whole.
13.20.5.41Listen 29 Sep 2020… where an aspirant is unable to calm his restless thoughts, in addition to the constant daily regular effort to do so--for perseverance is part of the secret of success--he may pray to the higher self to take possession of his mind. Such prayer must be deeply heartfelt, constantly repeated, and animated by a longing to get away from the peaceless ego.
12.18.2.188, ExcerptListen 30 Sep 2020
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