Quote of the Week$151 - The Point to Life

Quote of the Week #151 - The Point to Life

There is no point to life; life itself is the point.

--Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from Raodside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler, Spirituality & Health Magazine, July/August 2020 issue

Quote of the Week #150 - Saints and Sinners

Quote of the Week #150 - Saints and Sinners

There is no saint without a past

and no sinner without a future.

--Shri Babaji Haidakhan

Quote of the Week #149 - Here, There and Everywhere

Quote of the Week 412 - Here, There and Everywhere

My three children, the only European children at Tiruvannamalai, were conspicuous among the devotees. One evening, in December 1946 Sri Bhagavan initiated the two elder of them into meditation, and if their efforts to describe it fail, so do those of older people. Kitty, who was ten, wrote: “When I was sitting in the hall this evening Bhagavan smiled at me and I shut my eyes and began to meditate. As soon as I shut my eyes I felt very happy and felt that Bhagavan was very, very near to me and very real and that he was in me. It wasn’t like being happy and excited about anything. I don’t know what to say, simply very happy and that Bhagavan is so lovely.”    

And Adam, who was seven, wrote: “When I was sitting in the hall I didn’t feel happy so I began to pray and I felt very happy, but not like having a new toy, just loving Bhagavan and everyone.”

…

When Frania, the youngest child, was seven the other two were talking about their friends and she, having no real friends yet but not wanting to be left out, said that Dr. Syed was the best friend she had in the world.

…

And her mother said, “What about Bhagavan?”

Frania said, “Bhagavan is not in the world.”

…

            Later, Dr. Syed asked the child where Bhagavan was if not in the world, and she replied, “He is everywhere.”

            Still he continued, “How can we say that he is not a man in the world like us when we see him sitting on the couch and eating and drinking and walking about?”

            And the child replied, “Let’s talk about something else.”

--from Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge, by Arthur Osborne

Quote of the Week #148- Surf's Up

Quote of the Week #148 - Surf’s Up

With the world changing so rapidly, there’s no point in being optimistic or pessimistic about anything. You’ve just got to surf uncertainty, because it’s all we get.

--Alan Alda, June/July 2020 AARP Magazine

Quote of the Week #147 - Silver Threads

Quote of the Week #147 - Silver Threads

They say silver threads emerge   

From unknown to known,

Traversing all dimensions,

Conveyors of life-light.

And every morning

During my daily shower

A few of those threads

Go down the drain.

--Steven J. Gold

Quote of the Week #146 - Perspectives in Difficult Times

Perspectives in Difficult Times

It started to rain

In the middle of my walk.

A soft, gentle, spring-heralding rain.

I got wet

I didn’t mind.

In fact, it felt good,

reassuring somehow.

And the birds

Couldn’t care less.

--Steven J. Gold

Quote of the Week #145 - Happening: The Will of a Good and Loving God?

Quote of the Week #145 - Happening: The Will of a Good and Loving God?

Question: I believe everything that happens is God’s will. My problem is reconciling a good and loving God with all the horrible things that happen. Can you help me make sense of this?

Answer: Yes: Stop insisting God is good and loving. I too believe that everything that happens is God’s will, but I don’t believe that God is good or loving or that God wills freely. God is Reality, the Happening happening as all happening. God’s will is that everything happens because the conditions for it happening are such that it must happen. God’s will doesn’t make things happen, God’s will is what happens. When you know that all happening is God and God’s will, you are free from the distraction, “Why did God will this to happen,” and free for engaging with what happened. When a tragedy happens, don’t ask, “Why?” ask, “What can I do to alleviate the suffering happening with this tragedy?”

--Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from his column, “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler” in Spirituality & Health magazine, January/February 2020

Quote of the Week #144 - God is Simple. Everything else is Complex.

Quote of the Week #144 - God is Simple. Everything else is Complex.

God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.

Good and evil is the challenging riddle which life places sphinxlike before every intelligence. Attempting no solution, most men pay forfeit with their lives, penalty now even as in the days of Thebes. Here and there, a towering lonely figure never cries defeat. From the maya of duality he plucks the cleaveless truth of unity.

I have long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one’s thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of ‘self-expression,’ individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and the universe.

Man can understand no eternal verity until he has freed himself from pretensions. The human mind, bared to a centuried slime, is teeming with repulsive life of countless world-delusions. Struggles of the battlefields pale into insignificance here, when man first contends with inward enemies! No mortal foes these, to be overcome by harrowing array of might! Ominipresent, unresting, pursuing man even in sleep, subtly equipped with a miasmic weapon, these soldiers of ignorant lusts seek to slay us all. Thoughtless is the man who buries his ideals, surrendering to the common fate. Can he seem other than impotent, wooden ignominious?

To love both the invisible God, Repository of All Virtues, and visible man, apparently possessed of none, is often baffling! But ingenuity is equal to the maze. Inner research soon exposes a unity in all human minds – the stalwart kinship of selfish motive. In one sense at least, the brotherhood of man stands revealed. An aghast humility follows this leveling discovery. It ripens into compassion for one’s fellows who are blind to the healing potencies of the soul awaiting exploration.

Only the shallow man loses responsiveness to the woes of others’ lives, as he sinks into narrow suffering of his own. The one who practices a scalpel self-dissection will know an expansion of universal pity. Release is given him from the deafening demands of his ego. The love of God flowers on such soil. The creature finally turns to his Creator, if for no other reason than to ask in anguish: “Why, Lord, why?” By ignoble whips of pain, man is driven at last into the Infinite Presence, whose beauty alone should lure him.

--an unnamed wandering sadhu, as quoted by Paramhansa Yogananda in Autobiography of a Yogi

Quote of the Week #143 - A Musician's Devotion to His Instrument

Quote of the Week #143 - A Musician’s Devotion to His Instrument

Piper, sell your pipes, buy your wife a gown…

Piper, sell your pipes, buy your wife a gown…

Piper, sell your pipes, buy your wife a gown…

I wouldn’t sell my pipes for all with wives in town…

--from a rendition of a traditional Irish song, “Cucanandy” by The Gloaming