Ethics – Real morality implies a habitual temper of mind, which cannot be artificially produced by mere teaching.
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“The objectivity of God has gone hand in hand with the slavery and corruption of man.”
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Sin means misdirected energy.
Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the forest shall be at peace with you.
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It was Virgil who in describing the crew which in his mind would win the race said of them, – They can because they think they can.
Back of thy parents and grandparents lies The Great Eternal Will! That too is thine Inheritance, – strong, beautiful, divine, sure lever of success for one who tries.
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Be yourself; don’t class yourself among the second-hand among the they-say people.
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Don’t give yourself over as an ingredient to the “Mush of Concession.” Just be yourself. No courtesy to the “night of ignorance.” Why should the world be so poor as to be all the time asking this and that of you? Your living as God is favour enough upon the people. Be God and this is the highest boon you can confer upon mankind.
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The one who strives for Effect is always fooled more than he succeeds in fooling others.
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A good book passes from reader to reader, circulating from mouth to mouth, and it publishes itself.
If I can lead anyone to the conscious realization of his own Divinity, dispel fear, inspire independence: I can then well afford to be careless as to whether the critics praise or whether they blame. If it is blame, then under these circumstances it is as the cracking of a few dead sticks on the ground below, compared to the matchless music that the soft spring gale is breathing through the great pine forest.
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Don’t you preach dead Christ. In his own words, let the dead bury their dead. Teach as did Jesus, the Christ within, the living God.
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Some people complain of religion dying out. Religion dying out? How can anything die before it is really born?
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When you are in the arms of the bear even though he is hugging you, look him in the face and laugh, and all the time keep your eye on God (bull). If you allow all of your attention to be given to the work of the bear, the bull may get entirely out of your sight.
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Pleasures imply ease – ease of inertia, which must be overcome. Happiness, bliss embraces the ease of innate selflessness which must be kept up.
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In a museum there was a picture of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figure being there. The world is all the richer for having the devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.
The soul grows in happiness just as the outward state grew more intolerable. There is no other Emotion than religions emotion that can bring a man to this peculiar pass.
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Religion makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary, i.e. Surrender.
Religion = the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine. (Prof. James).
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Religion and Neurology: To the medical Materialist: The liver determines the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the devotee.
Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are. If by this or that medicine you claim to cure religio-mania, hence calling it a disease: I can cure all your scientific capacities by a drug; or we can cure a man of his life by some poisonous chemical. Would that prove that scientific acumen or life are diseases? No. Just as no medicines can make us scientists, so no chemical can give us the religious sense.
Worth measured by results: “What right have we to believe Nature under any obligations to do her work by means of complete minds only? It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is .alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical stand-point if in other qualities of character, he was singularly defective.” A tree is known by the fruit it bears. “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.” “Not that which goes into but that which comes out of him,” This is Parasamvedya.
The Svasamvedya element is, care not for the fruit, mind ye only the watering of the tree.
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One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life.
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The best repentance is to be up and act for righteousness and forget that you ever had relations with sin. – Spinoza
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Evil is a disease, but worry over a disease is a worse disease,
Thy enemy would make thee believe, as soon as thou fallest into any fault that thou walkest in error, telling thee of thy misery and making a giant of it. O blessed soul, open thine eyes; and shut the gate against these diabolical suggestions, trusting in the mercy divine. Would not he be a mere fool who running at tournament with others and falling in the best of the career should lie weeping on the ground and brooding; over his fall. Man, lose no time, get up and take the course again; for to rise quickly and continue the race again is as good as having no fall at all.
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Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. “Be vigilant day and night,” they adjure us, ” hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent; all the time on the rack”. The tense and Voluntary attitude is bound to become a fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight. Under these circumstances the way to success is by “Surrender,” rest, relaxation, abnegation, grace, faith.
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The capacity or incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic character.
The medico-materialistic explanation is that simple cerebral processes act more freely where they are left to act automatically by the shunting out of physiologically higher ones which seeking to regulate only succeed in inhibiting results.
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Conversion: The word ‘soul’ need not be taken in the ontological sense. Buddhists or Humians might describe the same facts in the phenomenal terms. For them the soul is only a succession of fields of Consciousness: yet there is found in each field a part or subfield which figures as focal and contains the excitement and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of this part we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it from the rest, words like “here,” “this,” “now,” “mine” or “me”; and we ascribe to the other parts the positions “there,” “then,” “that,” “his,” or “thine,” “it,” “not me.” But a “here” can change to a “there” and a “there” become a “here,” and what was “mine” and what was “not mine” change their places.
Centre of gravity of man’s thoughts varies according as his body of thoughts undergoes variations.