The Library
... The day will come when science, waking more fully than it is now from its materialistic sleep, will confess humbly that the soul of man does really exist…
2.1.2.1,Listen ... What is it that has turned man's heart towards religion, mysticism, philosophy since time immemorial? His aspiration towards the diviner life is unconscious testimony to its existence. It is the presence within him of a divine soul which has inspired this turning, the divine life itself in his heart which has prompted his aspiration…
2.1.2.1,Listen What is the truest highest purpose of man's life? It is to be taken possession of by his higher self. His dissatisfactions are incurable by any other remedy…
2.1.2.1,Listen ... If the mind is to become conscious of itself, it can do so only by freeing itself from the ceaseless activity of its thoughts. The systematic exercise of meditation is the deliberate attempt to achieve this…
2.1.2.1,Listen … The mystic who sits in an hour-long meditation is not wasting his time, even though he is indulging in something which to the sceptic seems meaningless. On the contrary, his meditation is of vital significance…
2.1.2.1,Listen … I would be failing in a duty to those less fortunate if through fear of being thought a boaster I failed to state that my researches have led me to the certain discovery of the soul …
2.1.2.1,Listen In man, Heaven and Earth unite. He is free to enjoy the one or the other. The first leads to peace of mind, the second ties him to the ego's wheel. Whoever sincerely wants access to divinity may find it, but he must make the first move.
2.1.2.17Listen Those who feel an emptiness in their hearts despite worldly attainments and possessions may be unconsciously yearning for the Overself.
2.1.2.28Listen Can we build a bridge between this sorrowful earthly life and the peaceful eternal life? Are the two forever sundered? Every seer, sage, and saint answers the first question affirmatively and the second negatively.
2.1.2.31Listen Those who have found their way to this Path leave forever behind them their aimless wanderings of the past.
2.1.2.37Listen The qualifications required from him are love of the highest, desire for truth, conformity of living to the divine laws, and balance in his own person.
2.1.2.60Listen The seeker who has a strong yearning for Truth and who has a sense of correct values already possesses some of the indispensable qualifications for this path, and should go far upon it. However, the will to continue despite all obstacles, together with a special kind of patience, is also essential--particularly in the earlier stages.
2.1.2.61Listen A mighty longing for liberation from one's present condition is a prerequisite for the philosophic quest.
2.1.2.63Listen To obtain something they greatly desire, men will arouse their will and apply it strongly. Only when sufficient experience of life matures them sufficiently are they likely to arouse and apply this same will to the Quest itself.
2.1.2.65Listen That man is excellently qualified for philosophy who has a strong spirit for service, who is well-balanced emotionally, and who is well-equipped intellectually.
2.1.2.75Listen If he is as determined as he is sincere, as unselfish as self-disciplined, as sensitive as intuitive, he may expect to go far on the quest.
2.1.2.82Listen In humility the quest is to be begun: in even greater humility it is to be fulfilled.
2.1.2.83Listen When these words awaken profound echoes in a man's soul, he shows thereby that the intuitive element is sufficiently alive to enable him to profit by further teaching.
2.1.2.86Listen The quest is unattractive to sinners and unnecessary to saints. It is for those who are not wholly indifferent to worldly desires nor yet too strongly attached to them.
2.1.2.97Listen Those who are satisfied with centering themselves within the ego will not be drawn to such teachings, which educate the pupils to cultivate constantly a withdrawal from the ego.
2.1.2.105Listen He may ask himself whether he has any competence for such a great task. But this is to forget that he has been led to this point, to the quest, that the same higher self or power which out of its grace did this can lead him still farther.
2.1.2.117Listen He who wants to co-operate with the World-Idea, which is inherent in all things, all beings, all the universe, to live in harmony with it and with his fellow-creatures, will be attracted to this quest sooner or later.
2.1.2.118Listen Whether he is able to follow regular periods of meditation or not, he may still have the basic essential for spiritual advancement. This is the fundamental mood of aspiration, a strong yearning to gain the consciousness of his innermost being.
2.1.2.124Listen The traveller on this quest is a man who uses his consciousness and his will to better his character and purify his heart.
2.1.2.125Listen Just because most people appear to have superficial interests and are not yet ready for the deeper thoughts of philosophy does not necessarily mean that they are not making spiritual progress. On the contrary, they may be doing very well on their own particular levels of development. It will simply be necessary for them to incarnate many more times before they are capable of understanding the more advanced truths.
2.1.2.136Listen No age is unsuited to the study and practice of philosophy. No one is too young to begin it, nor too late.
2.1.2.138Listen It is because we have the Overself ever present within us that we are ever engaged in searching for it. The feeling of its absence (from consciousness) is what drives us to this search. Through ignorance we interpret the feeling wrongly and search outside, among objects, places, persons, or even ideas.
2.1.2.158Listen Each man discovers afresh for himself this homey old truth, that he has a sacred soul. He need not wait for death to discover it or depend solely on the words of dead prophets until then.
2.1.2.159Listen There are reserves of Power and Intelligence within yourself, of which you live undreaming.
2.1.2.161Listen At intervals, on certain grave, joyous, or relaxed occasions, he may feel a deep nostalgia for what he may only dimly and vaguely comprehend. He may name it, in ignorance, otherwise but it will really be for his true spiritual source.
2.1.2.163Listen What a bitter irony it is that the soul, which is so near, in our very hearts in fact, is yet felt by so few!
2.1.2.164Listen In starting this task, he knows that he is not carrying out his own personal desire but following a way chalked out for him by the higher self.
2.1.2.168Listen ... He is being called indeed, to die to his ego, to take the desires and passions, the greeds and hates out of his life, to learn the art of living in utter independence of externals and in utter dependence on the Overself. And this is that same call which Jesus uttered when he said: ”He that loseth his life shall find it.” Thus the sorrows of life on earth are but a transient means to an eternal end, a process through which we have to learn how to expand awareness from the person to the Overself.
2.1.2.170,Listen If a man will not come to this quest willingly, because it leads to Truth and he loves Truth, then he must be forced onto it, unwillingly, because there is no other way to alleviate his burdens and reduce his miseries.
2.1.2.171Listen Most persons have no inclination to wake up when dreams are pleasant, whereas when they are frightening they soon awaken. So too the dream of worldly life does not impress them with the need of true religion until it becomes tragic or severely disappointing. Only when sorrow drives them to question the value of living do they take a real interest in non-worldly urges.
2.1.2.172Listen Certain events will so arrange themselves as to put a man upon the quest, or if he is already on it, to prepare him for a further advance. They will not be pleasant events, for they will crush his ego, or render it lame and weak for a time. But it is only through this apparent defeat by circumstances that he is compelled to accept a course which will, spiritually, benefit him greatly in the end.
2.1.2.173Listen Do men's hearts have to be broken before they yield to the higher power? Often, yes, but not if they heed the teachers, prophets, seers, and sages.
2.1.2.174Listen Where a man is ready for this Quest but stubbornly clings to his old familiar way of thought and life, the Overself may or may not release karma that will tear him away from it…
2.1.2.175,Listen Most persons need a drastic shock, an enforced awakening, a sharp arousal from that long sleep which is the egoic existence, if they are ever to come alive spiritually. This is effective only if it breaks old habits, trends, and inclinations, thus making a new man…
2.1.2.177,Listen When a man comes to the point when all his outer life dissolves in tragedy or calamity, he comes also to the point when this quest is all that is left to him. But he may not perceive this truth. He may miss his chance.
2.1.2.178Listen When one's personal life is miraculously saved during some period of great danger, perhaps in the face of death, it is for a purpose.
2.1.2.180Listen Before a man comes to this path he may have to grope and stumble and struggle for years.
2.1.2.181Listen If the man lets others draw him down below his own level, the emotion of remorse and disgust or the logic of suffering and self-preservation may force his return.
2.1.2.182Listen It is for those who feel that their lives ought to hold something more than the mere gaining of material necessities or even the mere satisfying of intellectual urges.
2.1.2.185Listen When a man becomes tired of hearing someone else tell him that he has a soul, and sets out to gain firsthand experience of it for himself, he becomes a mystic…
2.1.2.187,Listen Men will seek to feel the real life only after they have felt the uncertainties of human affection, the transiencies of human passion, and the insufficiencies of human activities.
2.1.2.188Listen The presence of the Overself within us sooner or later, when the mind is sufficiently developed, creates of itself the craving for truth and the abstract questions about life, God, and man.
2.1.2.190Listen This knowledge that life in this world can never be fully satisfying makes him commit himself one day to the quest.
2.1.2.191Listen They come to this quest seeking something beyond the misery, wretchedness, and cruelty of this chaotic world, something of light, warmth, kindness, and peace.
2.1.2.203Listen The full-grown person finds in his experience of the world and in the knowledge of himself sufficient subject matter for thought about human affairs. He then asks questions, the great questions, which men have asked since earliest antiquity: What am I? Whither do I go?
2.1.2.209Listen There are billions of forms and of creatures in the universes spread through space. They appear and vanish, they come and go, create and pass away, grow and decay, act and interact. This has been going on for immense periods of time; but in the thoughtful man’s mind there must arise the question, “To what end was is and shall be all this?”
2.1.2.211Listen He may arrive at a true appraisal of life after he has experienced all that is worth experiencing. This is the longest and most painful way. Or he may arrive at it by listening to, and believing in, the teachings of spiritual seers. This is the shortest and easiest way. The attraction of the first way is so great, however, that it is generally the only way followed by humanity …
2.1.2.213,Listen Before a man will undertake the moral purifications with which the quest must begin, and the mental trainings which must complement them, he must have some incentive to do so. Where will he find it? The answer is different with different men, since it depends on his stage of evolution, character, and destiny. If some find it in the sadness produced by world-weariness, others find it in the joy produced by a Glimpse. Still others are prompted by the hunger for Truth or by the thirst for self-improvement, or even blindly by the tendencies brought over from previous births.
2.1.2.221Listen If the teaching favourably commends itself to any individual from the first contact as being requisite to his needs, this is often a sign that he has followed it in earlier existences.
2.1.2.224Listen One disciple who picked up the Quest again in this life described it as a feeling of reunion, of coming home.
2.1.2.225Listen When he wakes up to the suspicion that the ordinary purposes of human life on earth hide other much more important ones, and that he will have to find them by himself, he may begin to seek out and study the teachings of those who have gone farther along this way.
2.1.2.227Listen It is not only those who have exhausted all their limited means of attaining happiness who turn away and come to this quest: there are others whose capacity for enjoyment still remains, but having had the experience of a single “glimpse” or understood the pointers given by inspired art, they are attracted towards living on a higher plane.
2.1.2.241Listen But where some turn away from the world for negative reasons because of their misery and disappointment, others come to the quest for positive reasons; they have sensed or suspected, felt, or been told of, a higher plane of existence: they respond to a divine call.
2.1.2.242Listen Deeper than all other desires is this need to gain consciousness of the Overself. Only it is unable to express itself directly at first, so it expresses itself in the only ways we permit it to—first the physical, then the emotional and intellectual quest of happiness.
2.1.2.244Listen The impulse which puts a man's feet on this path, is not always an explicable one. It is sometimes hard to say why he obeys it, when it will hinder his ego's natural cravings at the very start and lead to an unnatural self-effacement at the very end. All he knows is that something in him bids him begin the journey and keeps him on it despite its hurts to his pride, his passion, and his ego.
2.1.2.245Listen He can no more help being on the quest than he can help being on this earth. The hunger to know the inner mysteries of life, and the aspiration to experience the Soul's peace and love will not leave him alone. They are part of him, as hands or feet are parts of him.
2.1.2.251Listen It is natural and inevitable that, when ripened by experience, men should yearn to be united with their divine Source.
2.1.2.252Listen The time will come when, under the pressure of the mysterious inner self, this quest will become the most important enterprise of his life.
2.1.2.257Listen Why are they seeking truth? Because they have at last become sensitive enough to respond to the existence of the diviner self within them, the Overself in which only truth exists. The fact of its existence has pressed them subconsciously from within and finally provoked them into feeling a need to become aware of, and co-operative with, the Overself.
2.1.2.258Listen The urge to follow the Quest, the impulse to find the higher consciousness, comes from the Overself.
2.1.2.263Listen There is something within us which will not let us rest in what we are, which urges us to think of still higher possibilities.
2.1.2.265Listen This is the paradox that when you take the first step on this Quest, it is grace which impels you to do so. Yet you think and act as if you have never been granted the divine gift.
2.1.2.266Listen There comes a time when the unfulfilled possibilities of a man begin to haunt him, when his innermost conscience protests against the wastage of this reincarnation.
2.1.2.267Listen Too intelligent to accept the narrow short-sighted view of life, too idealistic to accept a merely animal satisfaction of desires, he needs guidance. This is what the quest is for.
2.1.2.271Listen The consciousness of his own imperfection sooner or later awakens in him an urge to seek perfection, that is, to enter on the Quest.
2.1.2.275Listen When he sees how the little personal self has brought him so much pain sorrow disappointment and waste of years, that even when it brought him success the latter turned out to be false and deceptive, he will become disgusted with it. He will not want to live with the ego any longer and will yearn to get away from it altogether.
2.1.2.283Listen Men of rank, fortune, influence, or power may become complacent, satisfied with what they are or have or where they are. But this is a condition which cannot last. Why? Because the higher purpose of life, embodied in the World-Idea, is also present and will make appropriate change or exert appropriate pressure at the destined time.
2.1.2.285Listen Some people seem hungry for Truth. This is because society has starved them and given them no satisfaction other than a surface one.
2.1.2.302Listen For some people the Quest begins with a feeling that something is missing from their life, a need that none of their possessions or relations can satisfy.
2.1.2.304Listen With this event a new era opens in his personal life. He feels that, for the first time in his life, he has touched real being when hitherto he has known only its shadow. It is the first link in a whole chain of good consequences. Consequently it is in reality the most important one. Whoever once gives his allegiance to the Overself as affirmed and symbolized by his entry on the quest, undertakes a commitment of whose ultimate and tremendous consequences he has but a vague and partial notion.
2.1.2.309Listen Every man who catches such a glimpse of his diviner possibilities will be haunted forever after by them until he tries to catch up in actual thought and life with them. The endeavour to do so brings him sooner or later on the Quest.
2.1.2.313Listen It is this feeling that he is not in his true place that pushes a man into this search for a teaching or a teacher.
2.1.2.319Listen All that has happened before his entry upon the quest has really been converging towards it.
2.1.2.326Listen They are not necessarily more materialistic. It is simply that they have not begun to think about life, to question its meaning and ask for its purpose.
2.1.2.334Listen There are now so many activities calling for his interest and energies that modern man thinks he has no time to devote to finding his soul. So he does not seek it: and so he remains unhappy.
2.1.2.342Listen Most men devalue themselves, although they do not know it. A part of them is divine, but it is ignored and neglected.
2.1.2.357Listen Most people are like sleep-walkers, caught up in their own illusions. Their belief that they are awake is the biggest of these illusions.
2.1.2.362Listen So long as we keep ourselves focused wholly in the physical world, thoughts such as these may be read but will not reach our minds.
2.1.2.393Listen … People live largely in delusion and deception, especially self-deception. “Why am I here on earth?” is a question for which they can only find one answer: to satisfy their own material desires.
2.1.2.406,Listen ... These new ideas will assume the characteristics of seeds, which under the water of the student's own aspiration and the sunshine of visible and invisible forces, will grow gradually into fruitful understanding and deeds. For the karmic consequence of such interest will be one day birth into a family where every opportunity for advancement will be found.
2.1.2.416,Listen The yearning for spiritual light wells up in the heart spontaneously. It is a natural one. But desires, egoism, and materialism cover it for so long a time that it seems unnatural.
2.1.2.417The ideal may appeal, coming as it does from the Overself, but the ego will put up obstacles, resistances, to its realization.
2.1.2.419Listen Procrastination may be perilous. Later may be too late...
2.1.2.425,Listen Human beings are given more than one chance to redeem themselves. Such is the mercy of the higher power.
2.1.2.427Listen ... Thought and action are reflected back by karma…
2.1.2.439,Listen Let no one make the mistake of separating out the quest from everyday life. It is Life itself! Questers are not a special group, a labelled species, which one does or does not join, but are all humanity.
2.1.2.440Listen All men seek for truth either consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and blindly, but they can seek only according to their capacity and ability, circumstances and preparedness.
2.1.2.443Listen Mankind is so near to God and yet so far away from God! Every fresh day is a fresh call from the Overself to man.
2.1.2.445Listen Hidden away in every man there exists a being immeasurably superior to the ordinary person that he is.
2.1.2.446The divine soul dwells in every man. Therefore, every man may find it, if only he will apply the faculties he possesses.
2.1.2.448Listen Man 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 It is because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness.
2.1.2.462Listen This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good man. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. His words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Krishna promised salvation even to those who had committed great crimes.
2.1.2.471Listen There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every man may come into this great light. But--some men may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way.
2.1.2.473Listen All the experiences of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for the Overself. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest.
2.1.2.475Listen Prophets and teachers, sages and saints have come among us in all times to speak of that inner life and inner reality which they have found. But only those who cared to listen have profited by these revelations, communications, and counsels, and still fewer have profited by being willing to follow the path of discipleship.
2.1.2.480Listen Knowledge of the higher laws, consciousness of the higher self, bring special obligations. To apply them carries new responsibilities to live according to them.
2.1.2.500Listen ... It is as though the gods like to play with him for a while to try his patience and endurance, just to see how keenly he wants this attainment. If he gives up at the first few hindrances or rebuffs, it means that he is not so very keen after all; but if he can endure and keep on, and keep on, and still keep on, no matter what happens, well then, the gods say, here is someone who really wants truth, so we must give it to him. That is the attitude which he must develop...
2.1.2.503,Listen … Those of us who have planted our feet on the grander path that shall lead one day to ultimate wisdom, have to go on—whether it be through sorrow or joy, weakness or strength, world-turmoil or world-peace. For us there is no turning back.
2.1.2.506,Listen He is indeed free who, unpossessed by his own possessions, unswayed by his own family, undeflected by his own desires, remains ever loyal to the quest.
2.1.2.508Listen This quest is an irreversible journey. Once you have really started on it there is no turning back. You may believe that you have given it up in despair or turned away from it for a worldlier existence, but you are only fooling yourself. For one day either a deep repressed hunger will suddenly reassert itself or else a cataclysmic turn of events will drive you back to seek this last and enduring refuge of man.
2.1.2.510Listen
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