Eric > Eric's Quotes

“In the perception of our world, we are the code makers that conditions love while also being a conduit of love that resolves the codes. As soon as we incarnate, we metaphorically become two lovers trying to find each other. One part searches life looking for our Soul. The other part is our Soul looking for experience. We are always approaching ourselves any way we can, trying to find ourselves and it’s important to remember that we can’t avoid this search. As humans, we are bound to the search. When we look outward for our lover, we encounter experience. When we look inward for our lover, we find resolution. We long for our own doppelganger, our Soul mate. We can’t avoid the search because that is the setup. We are the prodigal sons and daughters actualizing our Soul urges through the experience of life on earth and then turning inward resolving our life on earth by returning home to the source of love that is the “all parent” that gave us life.”
― Robert D. Waterman EdD, Transcendental Leadership: We Bring Love

“Consider that the real purpose for lack is making places ready to be filled with love. Our attitude makes the lack seem negative, but lack is really for receiving. Choice is about filling these spaces with love or aspects of our lives that we love. We can fill lack with judgment, being a victim, remorse, or even anger, or we can fill lack with love. When we push against our sense of lack, it creates a focus that attracts more lack. We see that lack has its own perfection in the way we choose. Since we are beggars with our lack, why not beg for love. The challenge of a reflective reality is that we generally expect love to come from someone else. We miss the reality that filling up with love can arise within us and flow from our transcendence.”
― Robert D. Waterman EdD, Transcendental Leadership: We Bring Love

“We think our job as humans is to avoid pain, our job as parents is to protect our children from pain, and our job as friends is to fix each other’s pain. Maybe that’s why we all feel like failures so often—because we all have the wrong job description for love. What my friends didn’t know about me and I didn’t know about Amma is that people who are hurting don’t need Avoiders, Protectors, or Fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpless vigil to our pain.”
― Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior

“When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. You, oh venerable one, are perhaps indeed a searcher, because, striving for your goal, there are many things you don't see, which are directly in front of your eyes.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The opposite of every truth is just as true! That's like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it's all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The sinner, which I am and which you are, is a sinner, but in times to come he will be Brahma again, he will reach the Nirvana, will be Buddha — and now see: these 'times to come' are a deception, are only a parable! The sinner is not on his way to become a Buddha, he is not in the process of developing, though our capacity for thinking does not know how else to picture these things. No, within the sinner is now and today already the future Buddha, his future is already all there, you have to worship in him, in you, in everyone the Buddha which is coming into being, the possible, the hidden Buddha. The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life. It is not possible for any person to see how far another one has already progressed on his path; in the robber and dice-gambler, the Buddha is waiting; in the Brahman, the robber is waiting. In deep meditation, there is the possibility to put time out of existence, to see all life which was, is, and will be as if it was simultaneous, and there everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, I see whatever exists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness, everything has to be as it is, everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me. I have experienced on my body and on my soul that I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it. — These, oh Govinda, are some of the thoughts which have come into my mind.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“This here,” he said playing with it, “is a stone, and will, after a certain time, perhaps turn into soil, and will turn from soil into a plant or animal or human being. In the past, I would have said: This stone is just a stone, it is worthless, it belongs to the world of the Maja; but because it might be able to become also a human being and a spirit in the cycle of transformations, therefore I also grant it importance. Thus, I would perhaps have thought in the past. But today I think: this stone is a stone, it is also animal, it is also god, it is also Buddha, I do not venerate and love it because it could turn into this or that, but rather because it is already and always everything — and it is this very fact, that it is a stone, that it appears to me now and today as a stone, this is why I love it and see worth and purpose in each of its veins and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness, in the sound it makes when I knock at it, in the dryness or wetness of its surface. There are stones which feel like oil or soap, and others like leaves, others like sand, and every one is special and prays the Om in its own way, each one is Brahman, but simultaneously and just as much it is a stone, is oily or juicy, and this is this very fact which I like and regard as wonderful and worthy of worship. — But let me speak no more of this. The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly — yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We have to go into the dark part of ourselves and love that dark part. For loving it is the key to the Kingdom. And we have to stand up and acknowledge that it is part of us.”
― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

“The darkness transformed the moment you accepted it, and all the power that was blocking you before now becomes the power of ascension, of upliftment. When you feel really negative and you talk about it—not as a victim but as a way of facing the enemy and loving it—you are saying, “Out of God come all things.” All things. That includes the negative things, too. Negative doesn’t mean bad; we make things bad by judging them.”
― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

“I am convinced that all of the negative things we hear or do, or that other people do, boil down to two primary motivations: I want to give love and I want to receive love. Then why not, right this moment, steel ourselves against failure, against subterfuge, against deception, and cut straight to love?”
― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

“Once you love the enemy inside, once you embrace it, that enemy will transform and yield its power to you.”
― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

“This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole, and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations