In the following material, you will read the innermost thoughts and feelings of inspired seekers who have gone before you. Some names you may know; others you will be glad to meet! But, as you journey along with them, sharing in their discoveries and discouragements, one thing should grow increasingly clear: the spirit that called them -- that awakened their hearts, and quickened their minds -- so that they might have "eyes to see, and ears to hear" -- is the same spirit calling you. These individuals came to know, as will you, the truth that sets us free: There is but one seeker, one search, and one sacred intelligence awakening you with its call...
Thinking about sense objects
Will attach you to sense objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse your mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life's only purpose.
-- Bhagavad Gita (500 – 200 BCE, India)
When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us seek the cause rather in ourselves than elsewhere. It is the action of an uninstructed person to lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others; of a partly instructed person, to lay the fault on himself; and of one perfectly instructed, neither on others, nor on himself.
-- Epictetus (55 – 135, Phrygia, Asia Minor)
When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.
-- Fen-Yang (947 – 1024, Ancient Taiyuan)
We are the cause of all our obstacles.
-- Meister Eckhart (1260 – ca. 1327, Thuringia)
Man does not know himself and does not know how to use the energies hidden in him, nor does he know that he carries the stars hidden in himself and that he is the microcosm, and thus carries within him the whole firmament with all its influence.
-- Paracelcus (1493 – 1541, Switzerland)
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
-- Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931, Lebanon)
Happiness does not come into being when you seek it; it is a byproduct; it comes into being when there is goodness, when there is love, when there is no ambition, when the mind is quietly seeking out what is true.
-- J. Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986, India)
For all who but strive, who will but use untried forces, unknown energies, there are un-gathered riches, un-heard harmonies, un-won crowns, yea, an unrevealed heaven.
-- Mary E. Bain (1898 – unknown, United States)
We seek what one might call a relative omnipotence: the power to have everything we want, to enjoy everything we desire, to demand that all our wishes be satisfied and that our will should never be frustrated or opposed. It is the need to have everyone else bow to our judgment and accept our declarations as law. It is the insatiable thirst for recognition of the excellence which we so desperately need to find in ourselves to avoid despair. This claim to omnipotence, our deepest secret and our inmost shame, is in fact the source of all our sorrows, all our unhappiness, all our dissatisfactions, all our mistakes and deceptions.
-- Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968, France)
What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible existence? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things... this darkness is the source of our vague fear and anxiety, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the "accidents" which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.
-- Idris Parry (1916 – 2008, Wales)
Whatever you think appears in consciousness as a show. That's the way thought works to display its content, as a show of imagination. Therefore if you think the observer is separate from the observed, it's going to appear in consciousness as two different entities. The point is that the words will seem to be coming from the observer who knows, who sees, and therefore they are the truth, they are a description of the truth. That's the illusion.
-- David Bohm (1917 – 1992, United States)
Resistance to the disturbance is the disturbance.
-- Vernon Howard (1918 – 1992, United States)
Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all mystics -- Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion -- are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
-- Anthony De Mello (1931 – 1987, British India)
Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of reality and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day...we become seekers.
-- Peter Matthiessen (1927, United States)
