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December 27, 2019
“Not my will, but Thine, be done.” This is the essence of all religion. Free will is given that self-will may be annihilated in the spiritual equivalent of instinct.
If we experience an urge to self-transcendence, it is because, in some obscure way and in spite of our conscious ignorance, we know what we really are. We know (or to be more accurate, something within us knows) that the ground of our individual knowing is identical with the Ground of all knowing and all being; that the Atman (Mind in the act of choosing to take the temporal point of view) is the same as Brahman (Mind in its eternal essence).
make room in the “thou” for the “That,” is to step aside so that the Ground may come to the surface of our consciousness, is to “die” so completely that we can say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
When the phenomenal ego transcends itself, the essential Self is free to realize, in terms of a finite consciousness,
the fact of its own eternity, together with the correlative fact, that every particular in the world of experience partakes of the timeless and the infinite. This is liberation, this is enlightenment, this is the beatific vision, in which all things are perceived as they are “in t...
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What matters is the awareness, if only for an hour or two, if only for a few minutes, of being someone, or more often something, other than the insulated self.
Being in a crowd is the best-known antidote to independent thought. Hence the dictator’s rooted objection to “mere psychology” and a private life. “Intellectuals of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.”
That God is, is a fact that men can actually experience, and is the most important of all the facts that can be experienced.
Everything that can be said about God, “is included in these words, namely, He is.” Because He is, we apprehend Him as ours and as father. And
There can be no effective mortification for enlightenment without meditation or devotion, which direct the attention away from self to a higher reality. As I have remarked before, all spiritual processes are circular, or rather spiral. In order to fulfill the conditions of enlightenment we must
have the glimmerings, if not of enlightenment itself, at least of an idea of what enlightenment consists in.
enlightenment, liberation, salvation, call it what you will, can come only for those who learn to live now in the contemplation of eternal reality, no longer in the past and future of
human memories and habits, desires and anxieties.
only the enlightened are capable of genuinely free choices and creative acts.
Such a being prays not at all for himself, but only that God may be worshiped, loved, and known by him as God ought to be worshiped, loved, and known—that the latent and potential seed of reality within his own soul may become fully actualized.
who must lose the life of self-will in order to gain the life of the divine will. These principles have been accepted as fundamental and axiomatic by all mystics, of whatever country, faith, and period.
yet still be hindered in his advance by
the uprush into consciousness of pointless and irrelevant distractions. This is the reason why all advanced spirituals have attached so much importance to such imbecilities and have ranked them as grave imperfections, even as sins.
That is why the would-be mystic is always told to refrain from busying himself with matters which do not refer to his ultimate goal, or in relation to which he cannot effectively do immediate and concrete good. This self-denying ordinance covers most of the things with which, outside business hours, the ordinary person is mainly preoccupied—news, the day’s installment of the various radio epics, this year’s car models and gadgets, the latest fashions. But it is upon fashions, cars, and gadgets, upon news and the advertising for which news exists, that our present industrial and economic system
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Men have always been a prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind;
“active annihilation” or the sinking of the self in God at every moment of the day, is much harder to achieve than
“passive annihilation” in mental prayer. The difference between the two forms of self-annihiliation is analogous to the difference between scientific work under laboratory conditions and scientific work in the field. As every scientist knows, a great gulf separates the achievement of results in the laboratory and the application of one’s discoveries to the untidy and disconcerting world outside its walls.
First, it is necessary to cultivate a constant awareness of the reality that is everything and the personal self that is less than nothing. Only on this condition can the desired nonattachment be achieved.
“disquietude is always vanity, because it serves no good. Yea, even if the whole world were thrown into confusion, and all things in it, disquietude on that account would still be vanity.” What
Grace is that which is given when, and to the extent to which, a human being
gives up his own self-will and abandons himself, moment by moment, to the will of God.
Little more than nothing, and sometimes nothing whatever, and sometimes even harm. One reason for hell being paved with good intentions is to be found in the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of actions performed by ordinary unregenerate men and women.
learned to practice the presence of God so continuously and unwaveringly that the distractions of outward activity were powerless
Knowledge is always in terms of concepts and can be passed on by means of words or other symbols. Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared. Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation. There can, of course, be knowledge of such an understanding, and this knowledge may be passed on in speech or writing, or by means of other
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from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.
they cherish the comforting delusion that knowledge and, above all, pseudoknowledge are understanding. Along with the closely related errors of over-abstraction, over-generalization, and over-simplification, this is the commonest of all intellectual sins and the most dangerous.
(and organized religion, let us never forget, has done about as much harm as it has done good) are all due, in the last analysis, to “mistaking the pointing finger for the moon”—in other words to mistaking the verbalized notion for the given mystery to which it refers or, more often, only seems to refer. This, as I have said, is one of
But the things which make us human are precisely the things which interfere with self-realization and prevent understanding.
“Learning,” says Lao-tzu, “consists in adding to one’s stock day by day. The practice of the Tao consists in subtracting.”
Once more we are confronted by the great paradox of human life. It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness; but in order to make full use of this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of the conditioning which developed it. By adding conceptual knowledge
to conceptual knowledge, we make conscious understanding possible; but this potential understanding can be actualized only when we have subtracted all that we have added.
The culture within which he lives is a prison—but a prison which makes it possible for any prisoner who so desires to achieve freedom, a prison to which, for this and a host of other reasons, its inmates owe an enormous debt of gratitude and loyalty. But though it is our duty to “honor our father and our mother,” it is also our duty “to hate our father and our mother, our
brethren and our sisters, yea and our own life”—
Truth can be defined in many ways. But if you define it as understanding (and this is how all the masters of the spiritual life have defined it), then it is clear that “Truth must be lived and there is nothing to argue about in this teaching; any arguing is sure to go against the intent of it.” This was something which Emerson knew and consistently acted upon. To the almost frenzied exasperation of that pugnacious manipulator of religious notions, the elder Henry James, he refused to argue about anything. And the same was true of William Law. “Away, then, with the fictions and workings of
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They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition. . . . For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any other way knowable in you or by you, but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And any pretended knowledge of any of those things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that has never entered into him.”
understanding will come to us only when we have subtracted what we know and made ourselves void and virgin, free as we were when we were not.
To understand the meaning of Tat tvam asi, “thou art That,” it is not necessary to be a profound Sanskrit scholar.
Understanding of the doctrine (as opposed to conceptualized knowledge about the doctrine) will come only to those who choose to perform the operations that permit Tat tvam asi to become a given fact of direct, unmediated experience, or in Law’s words “A self-evident sensibility of its birth within them.” Did
so that the individual soul may finally understand the That which, in spite of all its efforts to deny the primordial fact, is identical with the thou?
If, on the other hand, he wishes to transcend himself by actually understanding the primordial fact described or hinted at in the Upanishads and the other scriptures of what, for lack of a better phrase,
we will call “spiritual religion,” then he must ignore the problems of language and speculative philosophy, or at least relegate them to a secondary position, and concentrate his attention on the practical means whereby the advance from knowledge to understanding may best be made.
Unlike the poet, the mystic is “a son of time present.” “Past and present veil God from our sight,”
Pascal’s blunt language: we have to stultify our intelligence, because “intellectual pride deprives us of God and debases us to the level of animals.”
But he who seeks God in no special guise lays hold of Him as He is in Himself, and such as one lives with the Son and is the life itself.”
“If you look for the Buddha, you will not see the Buddha.” “If you deliberately try to become a Buddha, your Buddha is samsara.” “If a person seeks the Tao, that person loses the Tao.” “By intending to bring yourself into accord with Suchness, you instantly deviate.” “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” There is a Law of Reversed Effort. The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of simultaneously
