Quote of the Week #72- Pefect Doctrine/Dogma

[Student:]

If only it were possible to find understanding. If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?

[Master:]

There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of  yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.

-- Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game)

Quote of the Week #71 - Religion

Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.

--Jon Stewart

Quote of the Week #70

You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does…

You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

--Dag Hammarskjöld

Quote of the Week #69 - Joy Despite the Facts

I love being with those who have a joyful heart even though they have considered the facts.

-- Jack Kornfield, quoted in Shambhala Sun magazine, March 2015 Issue

Quote of the Week #68 - One's Lost Self

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.

-- Brendan Francis

Quote of the Week #67 - Fishing

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

--Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Week #66 - Dream Luminosity

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky…This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above the earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going.

In recent dreams, I have twice seen light so brilliant, so intense, that it “woke me up,” but the light did not continue into wakefulness. Which was more real, the waking or the dream?

-- Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River

Quote of the Week #65 - God is the Consciousness in Life

The purpose is to identify not with the body which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from my myths. Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is the vehicle? If you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go like an old car. There goes the fender, etc. But it’s expected: and then gradually the whole thing drops off and consciousness rejoins consciousness. I live with these myths – and they tell me to do this, to identify with the Christ or the Shiva in me. And that doesn’t die, it resurrects. It is an essential experience of any mystical realization that you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify with the consciousness in life – and that is the god.

--Joseph Campbell

Quote of the Week #64 - A Peaceful Mind Free From All Thought Constructs

By concentrating on the lotus of the heart, there arises a state of sorrowless joy which is infused with inner light; upon its emergence, such a state anchors the mind to a peaceful flow free from all thought constructs.

--Yoga Sutra 1:36, Samadhi Pada, expanded by Vyasa, as interpreted and translated by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait in The Secret of the Yoga Sutra; Samadhi Pada

Quote of the Week #63 - Two Sides of Being Alone

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

-- Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

Quote of the Week #62 - What You Do About It

Life happens. Life is ten percent what happened to you, is ninety percent what you do about it.

--Steve Harvey, Stayer University TV Commercial