The vital awareness

Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being.

David Steindl-Rast

Happiness

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Denis Waitley

Spiritual life

Energy conveys to us the idea of motion and activity. Inside a living organism we see a source of power, which by some manner is released in terms of movement.... Life is energy... it is the creator or initiator of movement change, development. We are different from moment to moment because the life principle is at work with us.... The spirit of humanity, like the forces of nature, and like the physical life, is at bottom energy.... Spiritual life, therefore, is just as much a development out of what has gone before in the evolutionary process as physical life is; which means that the origin of spiritual life is from within.

John Dietrich

Real life

The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. I am myself spiritually dead unless I reach out to the fine quality dormant in others. For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.

Felix Adler: An Ethical Philosophy of Life

Come alive

Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.

David Steindl-Rast:

The mysterious

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

Internal growth

The demands of internal growth are incomparably more important to us...than the need for any external expansion of our power.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When one is happy

This much is certain: when a man is happy, happy to the core and root of beatitude, he is no longer conscious of himself or anything else.

Meister Eckhart Quote

Rooted in self

To be present here is to be rooted in yourself, in being. It's to feel that subtle sense of aliveness. There's absolutely nothing to work out in your mind; it's too simple.

Eckhart Tolle

Who is your neighbor?

Love your neighbor, but who is your neighbor. Your neighbor is the one who is sent to you from the Divine. Your neighbor can be one who is a total stranger to you from afar. Your neighbor can be someone living close to you. But what is true is that your neighbor is one of the Light who needs your support as much as you need his.

Transform

You are the beginning of the transformed world.

Eckhart Tolle

A collective disease

Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. 

Eckhart Tolle

Simple as that

God is a metaphor for that which trancends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

Joseph Campbell

Being alive

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

Wrong thoughts

Wrong thoughts are inside us just because we identify ourselves with these thoughts.  If we identify with something else, immediately they have to leave us.”

- Sri Chinmoy

The greatest of these is love

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Jesus and Buddha

Jesus: Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Friend, let me take the speck out of your eye,” when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You, hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.


Buddha: The faults of others are easier to see than one’s own; the faults of others are easily seen, for they are sifted like chaff, but one’s own faults are hard to see. This is like the cheat who hides his dice and shows the dice of his opponent, calling attention to the other’s shortcomings, continually thinking of accusing him.

Remorse

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

-- Aldous Leonard Huxley

War inside ourselves

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives...inside ourselves.

~Albert Camus

Sacrifice

The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.

Mahatma Gandhi

Calm mind

When you meditate, what you actually do is to enter into a calm or still, silent mind. We have to be fully aware of the arrival and attack of thoughts. That is to say, we shall not allow any thought, divine or undivine, good or bad, to enter into our mind. Our mind should be absolutely silent. Then we have to go deep within; there we have to observe our real existence.

Sri Chinmoy