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To restrain the mind from wandering outward or inward, and keep the organs in their respective centres, is what is meant by the words Shama and Dama. Shama consists in not allowing the mind to externalise, and Dama, in checking the external instruments. Now comes Uparati which consists in not thinking of things of the senses. Most of our time is spent in thinking about sense-objects, things which we have seen, or we have heard, which we shall see or shall hear, things which we have eaten, or are eating, or shall eat, places where we have lived, and so on. We think of them or talk of them most
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Thus the world is going on, society goes on, and we, blinded slaves, have to pay for it without knowing. Study your own lives, and find how little of happiness there is in them, and how little in truth you have gained in the course of this wild-goose chase of the world.
he who takes happiness, must take misery also.
We all have this foolish idea that we can have happiness without misery, and it has taken such possession of us that we have no control over the senses.
we begin to weep, nature gives us a dollar; again we are whipped, and when we weep, nature gives us a piece of ginger-bread, and we begin to laugh again.
All knowledge is within us. All perfection is there already in the soul.
But this perfection has been covered up by nature;
is one of the evils of your Western civilisation that you are after intellectual education alone, and take no care of the heart.
Intellect can never become inspired; only the heart when it is enlightened, becomes inspired.
Men of heart get the “butter”, and the “buttermilk” is left for the intellectual.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
is the culture of the heart, really, and not that of the intellect that will lessen the misery of the world.
Intellect has been cultured with the result that hundreds of sciences have been discovered, and their effect has been that the few have made slaves of the many — that is all
Always cultivate the heart; through the heart the Lord speaks, and through the intellect you yourself speak.
What is the proof of God? Direct perception, Pratyaksha. The proof of this wall is that I perceive it. God has been perceived that way by thousands before, and will be perceived by all who want to perceive Him. But this perception is no sense-perception at all;
superconscious, and all this training is needed to take us beyond the senses.
True religion is entirely transcendental. Every being that is in the universe has the potentiality of transcending the senses;
“From whom all beings are projected, in whom all live, and unto whom they all return; that is God.”
the cause is the effect in another form.
theory of the Vedanta. It is that this universe, as we know and think it, does not exist, that the unchangeable has not changed, that the whole of this universe is mere appearance and not reality, that this idea of parts, and little beings, and differentiations is only apparent, not the nature of the thing itself.
In this struggle through what we call our environments, there will come a time when we shall find that these environments were almost zero in comparison with the power of the soul. It is only a question of time, and time is nothing in the Infinite. It is a drop in the ocean. We can afford to wait and be calm.
The very fact that we are here, shows that we are going towards the centre, and the manifestation of this attraction towards the centre is what we call love.
All beings, great or small, are equally manifestations of God;
the difference is
only in the manif...
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When we have succeeded in preventing all the forces in the world from throwing us off our balance, then alone we have attained to freedom, and not before. That is salvation. It is here and nowhere else; it is this moment.
