Man's Eternal Quest Quotes

I am. I think. I will. My hands. . . My spirit . . . My sky . . . This earth of mine . . . . What more must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer. I stand here on the summit of the mountain I lift my head and I spread m arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. It is my ears which hear, and the hearing of my ears gives its song to the world. It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth. It is my will which chooses, and the choice of my will is the only edict I must respect. . . . Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me. I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not a means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage on their wounds. I am not a a sacrifice on their altars. I am a man . . .

The initiative to undertake your most important duty in life is often buried beneath the accumulated debris of human habits.

The Hindus have a saying: “The child is busy with play, the youth is busy with sex, and the adult is busy with worries. How few are busy with God!

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it: The moon is within me, and so is the sun. The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it. So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught: When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done. For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge: When that comes, then work is put away. The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers. The musk is in the deer, but is seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.

Communion with God is the only thing to live for. You will have to come to that understanding eventually, often after much suffering. Why not learn now? He is ready to welcome you. You can’t fail to reach God ultimately. It is foolish to ask, “Will I be able to get into the kingdom of heaven?” There is no other place you can stay, for that is your real home. You don’t have to earn it. You are already God’s child, made in His image. You have only to tear away the mask of the human being and realize your divine birthright.

In other words, man is on an eternal quest for immortality and when he finds it, the search for God becomes irrelevant

At some point we have to own our choices. If not, we’re eternally children.

The greatest of all enemies of man is himself

The art of the alchemist, whether spiritual or physical, consists in completing the work of perfection, bringing forth and making dominant, as it were, the “latent goldness” which “lies obscure” in metal or man. The ideal adept of alchemy was therefore an “auxiliary of the Eternal Goodness.” By his search for the “Noble Tincture” which should restore an imperfect world, he became a partner in the business of creation, assisting the Cosmic Plan. Thus the proper art of the Spiritual Alchemist, with whom alone we are here concerned, was the production of the spiritual and only valid tincture or Philosopher’s Stone; the mystic seed of transcendental life which should invade, tinge, and wholly transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold. That this was no fancy of seventeenth-century allegorists, but an idea familiar to many of the oldest writers upon alchemy—whose quest was truly a spiritual search into the deepest secrets of the soul—is proved by the words which bring to an end the first part of the antique “Golden Treatise upon the Making of the Stone,” sometimes attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. “This, O Son,” says that remarkable tract, “is the Concealed Stone of Many Colours, which is born and brought forth in one colour; know this and conceal it . . . it leads from darkness into light, from this desert wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits to a free and ample fortune.

For good reason you are not allowed to remember your past incarnations. Suppose you have been born ten times. You have therefore had ten mothers. How can you love them all the same? You are meant to learn that behind those ten mothers there is One Mother; behind all friends, One Friend; behind all fathers, One Father; behind all loves, One Love. How wonderful is that recognition! It is as if you had been playing hideand-seek in the corridors of incarnations, and then you find Him! When I realized that One Love, I could not contain myself. My mind vanished into the Infinite Kingdom. It is so, even now. The joy of Spirit is endless.

Myth and Christianity are opposed on every point. Myth seeks the ascent of man to spirit; the Word of God seeks descent into flesh and blood. Myth wants power; revelation reveals the true power of God in the most extreme powerlessness. Myth wants knowledge; the Word of God asks for constant faith and, only within that faith, a growing, reverent understanding. Myth is the lightning that flashes when contradictory things collide—absolute knowledge, eternal quest; the revelation of God’s Word is gentle patience amidst the intractable tensions of life. Myth tears God and world apart by trying to force them into a magical unity; the revelation of God’s Word unites God and world by sealing the distance between them in the very intimacy of their communion.

Mary Magdalene Speaks: We walked together our souls united in the quest for truth He a man of flesh yet in his beautiful eyes eternity’s love shone out to our world I loved him He belongs now to the ages You and I shall never forget his beautiful light

Man lives in the body as a prisoner; when his term is over, he suffers the indignity of being thrown out. Love of the body is therefore nothing more than love of jail. Long accustomed to living in the body, we have forgotten what real freedom means. Being a Westerner is no excuse for not seeking freedom. It is vital to every man that he discover his soul and know his immortal nature. Yoga shows the way.

There is no book like the Qur’an. It quickens hearts and transforms lives, it leads whole people from glory to glory. It is the final answer to man’s eternal, existential quest. For Muslims, it is the ultimate arbiter of their destiny: be it their rise to the heights of glory and civilization or their fall into the bottomless pits of decay and ignominy, it all happens because of how they live with respect to the Qur’an.

Life is very tricky and we must deal with it as it is. If we do not first master it ourselves we cannot help anyone else. In the seclusion of concentrated thought lies hidden the factory of all accomplishment. Remember that. In this factory continuously weave your will pattern for attaining success over opposing difficulties. Exercise your will continuously. During the day and at night you have many opportunities to work in this factory, if you do not waste your time. At night I withdraw from the world’s demands and am by myself, an absolute stranger to the world; it is a blank. Alone with my will power, I turn my thoughts in the desired direction until I have determined in my mind exactly what I wish to do and how to do it. Then I harness my will to the right activities and it creates success. In this way I have effectively used my will power many times. But it won’t work unless the application of will power is continuous.

It is better to laugh a little than to make a tragedy of every misfortune. The Gita teaches: “He who feels neither rejoicing nor loathing toward the glad nor the sad (aspects of phenomenal life), who is free from grief and cravings, who has banished the relative consciousness of good and evil, and who is intently devout—he is dear to Me.” To have an optimistic disposition and try to smile is constructive and worthwhile; for whenever you express divine qualities, such as courage and joy, you are being born again; your consciousness is being made new by the manifestation of your true soul nature.

Many centuries ago the Christians of Abyssinia saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life. Those who were not yet stricken wrapped round them sheets in which men had died of plague, so as to make sure of their death. I grant you such a frenzied quest of salvation was not to be commended. It shows an overhaste—indeed, a presumptuousness, which we can but deplore. No man should seek to force God’s hand or to hurry on the appointed hour, and from a practice that aims at speeding up the order of events which God has ordained unalterably from all time, it is but a step to heresy.

How much good walking out to the desolate seashore and gazing out at the grey-green sea with the long white crests on its waves can do for a man who is downcast and dejected! But if one should have a need for something great, something infinite, something one can perceive God in, there is no need to go far in quest; it seems to me that I have seen something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression in a small child’s eyes when it awakens early in the morning and yells or laughs on finding the dear sun shining upon it’s cradle. If ever a “rayon d’en haut,” [a beam shines down from above] that may be where it is to be found.

We moderns experience thinking as an activity, as something that we do. Plato envisaged it as something which happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplated them. Like Socrates, he saw thought as a process of recollection, an apprehension of something that we had always known but had forgotten. Because human beings were fallen divinities, the forms of the divine world were within them and could be “touched” by reason, which was not simply a rational or cerebral activity but an intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us. This notion would greatly influence mystics in all three of the religions of historical monotheism.

The soul, all-perfect and ever perfect, is compelled by the law of evolution to incarnate repeatedly in progressively higher lives— retarded by wrong actions and desires and accelerated by spiritual endeavors—until Self-realization and God-union are attained. Having then transcended the Lord’s delusion, the soul is forever freed. “Their thoughts immersed in That (Spirit), their souls one with Spirit, their sole allegiance and devotion given to Spirit, their beings purified from poisonous delusion by the antidote of wisdom— such men reach the state of non-return” (Bhagavad Gita V:17). In the Bible it is similarly written: “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out” (Revelation 3:12)

In short, an idea like Beauty has much in common with what many theists would call “God.” Yet despite its transcendence, the ideas were to be found within the mind of man. We moderns experience thinking as an activity, as something that we do. Plato envisaged it as something which happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplated them. Like Socrates, he saw thought as a process of recollection, an apprehension of something that we had always known but had forgotten. Because human beings were fallen divinities, the forms of the divine world were within them and could be “touched” by reason, which was not simply a rational or cerebral activity but an intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us. This notion would greatly influence mystics in all three of the religions of historical monotheism.

If you can go to a movie and see a picture of war and suffering, and afterward say, “What a wonderful picture!” so may you take this life as a cosmic picture-show. Be prepared for every kind of experience that may come to you, realizing that all are but dreams. Each human life constitutes a drama; and the events of each day represent a drama. You are living a fresh one each of the year’s 365 days. The thought that you are merely a player in these dramas is very comforting. Realize that the acting out of whatever part you are called upon to play does not affect your real being. At the end of every earthly incarnation you are the same—the immortal soul—untouched by sickness, sorrow, or death. “He who cannot be ruffled by these (contacts of the senses with their objects), who is calm and evenminded during pain and pleasure, he alone is fit to attain everlastingness!” (Bhagavad Gita II:15.)

Torin, I didn’t know it was possible to find someone like you. You love me for who I am, not what I am. You’ve taught me that it’s okay to walk on my own, yet you’re always there to carry me when I can’t. You’ve taught me it’s okay to run, stumble, and fall, and pick myself up because a fall is nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve taught me it’s okay to fly because the sky is the limit and you’ll catch me if I fall. You inspire me, challenge me, and celebrate me. You are the first man I’ve ever loved and you will be the last man I’ll ever love. You are my one and only true love, and I promise I will love you for eternity.” Hawk draped the silk rope around our wrists and picked up the second one. Torin looked into my eyes as he started to speak, his voice sure, his words sincere. “Raine Cooper, from the moment you opened your door and our eyes met for the first time, I knew I had reached the end of my quest, yet I didn’t even know what I was searching for. I just knew you were the one, my omega. Where there was cold, you’ve brought warmth. Where there was sadness, you’ve brought happiness. Where there was pain, you’ve brought relief. Where there was darkness, you’ve brought light. You know me better than anyone, my fears, my shortcomings, my habits, yet you still love me. My vows to you are a privilege because I get to laugh with you, cry with you, walk with you, run with you, and fight with you for the rest of our lives. I promise to be patient. Most of the time,” he added, smiling. “I promise to be faithful, respectful, attentive, and to become even a better man for you. I promise to celebrate your triumphs and step back so you can shine like the star you are, but I’ll always be there when you need me. My shoulders are yours to cry on and to carry your burdens. My body is the shield that blocks the blows that might harm you and yours to do with as you wish. My hopes and dreams will always start and end with you. Yours will be the name I cry when I’m in need. Your eyes are the balm I seek when I’m in pain. And your soul is the beacon that my soul searches for when I’m lost. I will love you fiercely, tenderly, and passionately. And when we have children, I promise to be the best father a child could ever want. For you, Raine Cooper, deserve the best and I plan to give it you. You are my one and only true love, and I promise I will love you for eternity.

For here is the philosophy which sharpeneth the senses, satisfieth the soul, enlargeth the intellect and leadeth man to that true bliss to which he may attain, which consisteth in a certain balance, for it liberateth him alike from the eager quest of pleasure and from the blind feeling of grief; it causeth him to rejoice in the present and neither to fear nor to hope for the future. For that Providence or Fate or Lot which determineth the vicissitudes of our individual life doth neither desire nor permit our knowledge of the one to exceed our ignorance of the other, so that at first sight we are dubious and perplexed. But when we consider more profoundly the being and substance of that universe in which we are immutably set, we shall discover that neither we ourselves nor any substance doth suffer death; for nothing is in fact diminished in its substance, but all things wandering through infinite space undergo change of aspect. And since we are all subject to a perfect Power, we should not believe, suppose or hope otherwise, than that even as all issueth from good, so too all is good, through good, toward good; from good, by good means, toward a good end. For a contrary view can be held only by one who considereth merely the present moment, even as the beauty of a building is not manifest to one who seeth but one small detail, as a stone, a cement affixed to it or half a partition wall, but is revealed to him who can view the whole and hath understanding to appraise the proportions. We do not fear that by the violence of some erring spirit or by the wrath of a thundering Jove, that which is accumulated in our world could become dispersed beyond this hollow sepulchre or cupola of the heavens, be shaken or scattered as dust beyond this starry mantle. In no other way could the nature of things be brought to naught as to its substance save in appearance, as when the air which was compressed within the concavity of a bubble seemeth to one's own eyes to go forth into the void. For in the world as known to us, object succeedeth ever to object, nor is there an ultimate depth from which as from the artificer's hand things flow to an inevitable nullity. There are no ends, boundaries, limits or walls which can defraud or deprive us of the infinite multitude of things. Therefore the earth and the ocean thereof are fecund; therefore the sun's blaze is everlasting, so that eternally fuel is provided for the voracious fires, and moisture replenisheth the attenuated seas. For from infinity is born an ever fresh abundance of matter.

The quest for the eternal, all-beautiful, all-true and all-pure, and the quest to be close to the poor and most broken people appear to be so contradictory. And yet, in the broken heart of Christ, these two quests are united. Jesus reveals to us that he loves his Father, and is intimately linked to him; at the same time he is himself in love with each person and in a particular way with the most broken, the most suffering and the most rejected. To manifest this love, Jesus himself became broken and rejected, a man of sorrows and of anguish and of tears; he became the Crucified One. . . . Within the church, over the ages, one or the other aspect of this double mission has been emphasized, according to the call of God in different times and places, but both are also present. There are those who are called to the desert or the mountain top to see greater union with God through the Crucified One; and their prayer will flow upon the broken and the crucified ones of this world. And there are those called together to give their lives for and with the crucified and broken ones in the world; and they will always seek a personal and mystical union with Jesus so that they may love as he loves. Every community and every family are called to live both forms of mission, but in different ways: to pray and to be present in a special way to the smallest and the weakest within their own community or outside it, according to their individual call.

The Greeks, on the other hand, were passionately interested in logic and reason. Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 BCE) was continually occupied with problems of epistemology and the nature of wisdom. Much of his early work was devoted to the defense of Socrates, who had forced men to clarify their ideas by his thought-provoking questions but had been sentenced to death in 399 on the charges of impiety and the corruption of youth. In a way that was not dissimilar to that of the people of India, he had become dissatisfied with the old festivals and myths of religion, which he found demeaning and inappropriate. Plato had also been influenced by the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras, who may have been influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt. He had believed that the soul was a fallen, polluted deity incarcerated in the body as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth. He had articulated the common human experience of feeling a stranger in a world that does not seem to be our true element. Pythagoras had taught that the soul could be liberated by means of ritual purifications, which would enable it to achieve harmony with the ordered universe. Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, out of its element, imprisoned in the body but capable of regaining its divine status by the purification of the reasoning powers of the mind. In the famous myth of the cave, Plato described the darkness and obscurity of man’s life on earth: he perceives only shadows of the eternal realities flickering on the wall of the cave. But gradually he can be drawn out and achieve enlightenment and liberation by accustoming his mind to the divine light.

The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.

One can readily imagine in what terms a man of today would speak if called upon to make a pronouncement on the only religion ever to have introduced a radical formula of salvation: "The quest for deliverance can be justified only if one believes in the transmigration, in the endless vagrancy of the self, and if one aspires to halt it. But for us who do not believe in it, what are we to halt? This unique and negligible duration? It is obviously not long enough to deserve the effort an escape would require. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare consists in the termination of this one, this nightmare. Give us another one, we would be tempted to clamor, so that our disgraces will not conclude too soon, so that they may, at their leisure, hound us through several lives. Deliverance answers a necessity only for the person who feels threatened by a surfeit of existence, who fears the burden of dying and redying. For us, condemned not to reincarnate ourselves, what's the use of struggling to set ourselves free from a nonentity? to liberate ourselves from a terror whose end lies in view? Further more, what's the use of pursuing a supreme unreality when everything here-below is already unreal? One simply does not exert oneself to get rid of something so flimsily justified, so precariously grounded. Each of us, each man unlucky enough not to believe in the eternal cycle of births and deaths, aspires to a superabundance of illusion and torment. We pine for the malediction of being reborn. Buddha took exorbitant pains to achieve what? definitive death - what we, on the contrary, are sure of obtaining without meditations and mortifications, without raising a finger." ... That's just about how this fallen man would express himself if he consented to lay bare the depths of his thought. Who will dare throw the first stone? Who has not spoken to himself in this way? We are so addicted to our own history that we would like to see it drone on and on, relentlessly. But whether one lives one or a thousand lives, whether one has at one's disposal a single hour or all of time, the problem remains the same: an insect and a god should not differ in their manner of viewing the fact of existence as such, which is so terrifying (as only miracles can be) that, reflecting on it, one understands the will to disappear forever so as not to have to consider it again in other existences. This is what Buddha emphasized, and it seems doubtful he would have altered his conclusion had he ceased to believe in the mechanism of transmigration.

The psychological significance of the doctrine of predestination is a twofold one. It expresses and enhances the feeling of individual powerlessness and insignificance. No doctrine could express more strongly than this the worthlessness of human will and effort. The decision over man's fate is taken completely out of his own hands and there is nothing man can do to change this decision. He is a powerless tool in God's hands. The other meaning of this doctrine, like that of Luther's, consists in its function to silence the irrational doubt which was the same in Calvin and his followers as in Luther. At first glance the doctrine of predestination seems to enhance the doubt rather than silence it. Must not the individual be torn by even more torturing doubts than before to learn that he was predestined either to eternal damnation or to salvation before he was born? How can he ever be sure what his lot will be? Although Calvin did not teach that there was any concrete proof of such certainty, he and his followers actually had the conviction that they belonged to the chosen ones. They got this conviction by the same mechanism of self-humiliation which we have analyzed with regard to Luther's doctrine. Having such conviction, the doctrine of predestination implied utmost certainty; one could not do anything which would endanger the state of salvation, since one's salvation did not depend on one's own actions but was decided upon before one was ever born. Again, as with Luther, the fundamental doubt resulted in the quest for absolute certainty, but though the doctrine of predestination gave such certainty, the doubt remained in the background and had to be silenced again and again by an ever-growing fanatic belief that the religious community to which one belonged represented that part of mankind which had been chosen by God.

Habits are predatory; they destroy. You should learn to be happy with what you have. Don’t wish for anything more than what

He who conquers himself is the greatest victor in this battle of life. Money, fame, desires—everything that

One should not take his troubles too seriously, lest they darken the subconscious mind. Difficulties come to us in order to awaken us to the realization that this life is a dream. This lesson we all have to learn. Then we can understand why there is so much difference in everything in the world: some people are poor, some are rich; some are healthy and some are sick. Although it may seem to be a terrible and cruel game, the justification of the complications of life is that all of it is only a dream. Take it as such.

It is important to avoid identification with pain or anger or any kind of mental or physical suffering that comes. The best way to dissociate yourself from your difficulty is to be mentally detached, as if you were merely a spectator, while at the same time seeking a remedy. Don’t expect to attain unalloyed peace and happiness from earthly life. This should be your new attitude: no matter what your experiences are, enjoy them in an objective way, as you would a movie. You have to find true peace and happiness within yourself. Your outer experiences should be only fun.

The first stone, thrown by Hellgiver, crashed through the roof of a dyer's house close to St Brieuc's church and took off the heads of an English man-at-arms and the dyer's wife. A joke went through the garrison that the two bodies were so crushed together by the boulder that they would go on coupling throughout eternity.

There was so much to worry about: God finding the man in time, God preserving a few good eggs in Cynthia’s aging insides, the man being “God’s choice for Cynthia,” and keeping the lost millions from getting sick and dying before Cynthia could get there and do her stuff and save them. All sorts of clocks were ticking: biological, spiritual, eternal . . . and she’d have to learn the language first! Between the babies, learning the language, finding a man—and this didn’t even address the issue of the funds to get out there—how could God do it all before the change? The quest for Cynthia’s husband and the state of her withering ovaries became a major obsession of my childhood. “Have you found anyone yet?” I would ask. “No, but there are two Koreans coming up next weekend from the University of Lausanne,” Cynthia said. Cynthia

The great, terrifying existentialist question : If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I've always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses , and do something about it.

LEGALISM Legalism is the opposite heresy of antinomianism. Whereas antinomianism denies the significance of law, legalism exalts law above grace. The legalists of Jesus’ day were the Pharisees, and Jesus reserved His strongest criticism for them. The fundamental distortion of legalism is the belief that one can earn one’s way into the kingdom of heaven. The Pharisees believed that due to their status as children of Abraham, and to their scrupulous adherence to the law, they were the children of God. At the core, this was a denial of the gospel. A corollary article of legalism is the adherence to the letter of the law to the exclusion of the spirit of the law. In order for the Pharisees to believe that they could keep the law, they first had to reduce it to its most narrow and wooden interpretation. The story of the rich young ruler illustrates this point. The rich young ruler asked Jesus how he could inherit eternal life. Jesus told him to “keep the commandments.” The young man believed that he had kept them all. But Jesus decisively revealed the one “god” that he served before the true God—riches. “Go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matthew 19:21). The rich young ruler went on his way saddened. The Pharisees were guilty of another form of legalism. They added their own laws to the law of God. Their “traditions” were raised to a status equal to the law of God. They robbed people of their liberty and put chains on them where God had left them free. That kind of legalism did not end with the Pharisees. It has also plagued the church in every generation. Legalism often arises as an overreaction against antinomianism. To make sure we do not allow ourselves or others to slip into the moral laxity of antinomianism, we tend to make rules more strict than God Himself does. When this occurs, legalism introduces a tyranny over the people of God. Likewise, forms of antinomianism often arise as an overreaction to legalism. Its rallying cry is usually one of freedom from all oppression. It is the quest for moral liberty run amok. Christians, in guarding their liberty, must be careful not to confuse liberty with libertinism. Another form of legalism is majoring on the minors. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for omitting the weightier matters of the law while they were scrupulous in obeying minor points (Matthew 23:23-24). This tendency remains a constant threat to the church. We have a tendency to exalt to the supreme level of godliness whatever virtues we possess and downplay our vices as insignificant points. For example, I may view refraining from dancing as a great spiritual strength while considering my covetousness a minor matter. The only antidote to either legalism or antinomianism is a serious study of the Word of God. Only then will we be properly instructed in what is pleasing and displeasing to God.

He, too, was unable to escape the yearning for changelessness in a world of change, which Plato had so elegantly embodied in his theory of forms. The concluding Book of his Physics aims to show that motion, like time, "always was and always will be"-"an immortal never-failing property of things that are, a sort of life as it were to all naturally constituted things." Which set the stage for Aristotle's God-the Unmoved Mover. This may have been as much a deference to common sense-the prevalent views of his community-as to logic or evidence. The Unmoved Mover was his name for the most divine being accessible to man. Since the activity of God was thought, it was also man's highest faculty. "That which is capable of receiving the object of thought, is mind, and it is active when it possesses it. This activity therefore rather than the capability appears as the divine element in mind, and contemplation the pleasantest and best activity. If then God is for ever in that good state which we reach occasionally it is a wonderful thing-if in a better state, more wonderful still. Yet it is so. Life too he has, for the activity of the mind is life, and he is that activity. His essential activity is his life, the best life and eternal. We say then that God is an eternal living being, the best of all, attributing to him continuous and eternal life. That is God." Even in describing the Unmoved Mover, Aristotle makes activity his ideal.

But even when the quest does not wander off in this way, it remains a necessity that does not depart from animality. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species. Truth loves

Between the restless thoughts and God there is a wall; the ordinary person doesn’t try, so he never gets over that wall. But the spiritual fighter goes on. When the mind becomes still, you are in the kingdom of the Infinite. Those who have spent too much time on foolish things remain fruitlessly knocking outside. Communion with God is the only thing to live for. You will have to come to that understanding eventually, often after much suffering.

Surcharge Your Will Power Through Concentration The way to become receptive is to sit quietly and concentrate your thoughts on a worthy wish until your mind and thought become completely dissolved in that idea. Then will power becomes divine — omniscient and omnipotent — and can be successfully applied toward realizing your goal.

Our life experiences are all part of a dream. If you know you are dreaming, you don’t suffer from your bad experiences in the dream. But if you are identified with the dream, and in it someone strikes your head and kills you, that dream death seems a true and terrible experience until you wake up and understand it was not real. It is the same after death. Once you are out of this body, you realize you are not dead; you are free of a nightmare.

Life is very tricky and we must deal with it as it is. If we do not first master it ourselves we cannot help anyone else. In the seclusion of concentrated thought lies hidden the factory of all accomplishment. Remember that. [...] Exercise your will continuously. During the day and at night you have many opportunities to work in this factory, if you do not waste your time. At night I withdraw from the world’s demands and am by myself, an absolute stranger to the world; it is a blank. Alone with my will power, I turn my thoughts in the desired direction until I have determined in my mind exactly what I wish to do and how to do it. Then I harness my will to the right activities and it creates success. In this way I have effectively used my will power many times. But it won’t work unless the application of will power is continuous.

The root cause of the world’s troubles is this selfishness born of ignorance. Each person thinks he is doing right; but when he seeks to satisfy only his own interest, he is setting in motion the karmic law of cause and effect that will inevitably destroy his own and others’ happiness.

Man’s thoughts are a microcosmic borrowing from God’s thought power and so have the ability, even when undeveloped, to affect significantly his own health, happiness, and success and, when strongly reinforced by kindred thoughts of others, the world in which he lives.

Intensity, secrecy, devotion, and constancy are necessary. You don’t know when death will come. Every minute keep your mind on God. Everything you want and need is right within you; seek long and seek deeply. I meditate for hours; I see no one until I am finished. You must make up your mind that you are not going to be bothered by anyone or anything. Then you won’t know time. That is the only way to find Him. Don’t waste your time. When you are able to live in the divine consciousness, four to six hours of sleep are plenty; you will never feel tired, you will never miss sleep. Sleep is under my control; it is the same with eating. I have something infinitely greater.

If only people knew wherein lies their own good! To those who act wrongly the Self is an enemy. Befriend the Self and the Self will save you. There is no other savior than your Self. The fetters of ignorance and bad habits keep you bound. It is because you are determined to follow your wrong habits that you suffer. If only you would picture life a little ahead; lest the time, the precious time that is given you, slip away fruitlessly. The Hindus have a saying: “The child is busy with play, the youth is busy with sex, and the adult is busy with worries. How few are busy with God!” Banish the imaginary hope that happiness will come from worldly fulfillment. Prosperity isn’t enough, “gracious living” isn’t enough. You want to be eternally happy. Seize the God within you and realize that the Self is Divinity.

Until you release them, you cannot move on. Every morning, remind yourself that you are God’s child, and that no matter what the difficulties, you have the power to overcome them. Heir to the cosmic power of Spirit, you are more dangerous than danger!

As he stood there, bathing, feeling the cool water and the warm sun, listening to the sounds of the birds and the squirrels, he reflected, as he often had over the years, that many men spent their entire lives looking for peace but that such a quest was a fool’s errand. Peace wasn’t something a man could find for the looking. Instead, it found him. It found him in brief moments like this, so quick that a man, if he weren’t paying attention, might not notice at all, and so rare that he could never be sure that this time wasn’t the last time.

Faith and mythology, in their profoundest sense, are the twin pillars that uphold the vast cathedral of human consciousness. They are the intertwined roots that nourish our understanding of existence, grounding us in the fertile soil of the unknown. Faith, is the audacious whisper in the heart of man, defying the chasm of uncertainty with its unwavering resonance. It is the audacity to trust in the unseen, to hear the unspoken, and to pursue the uncharted. It is the flame that illuminates the caverns of our deepest fears, casting shadows on our doubts, and lighting the path to our truest selves. Meanwhile, mythology is the grand tapestry we weave to contain the boundless cosmos within the finite landscapes of our minds. It is the narrative thread that stitches together the fabric of our collective consciousness, painting vibrant portraits of gods and monsters, of heroes and villains, of creation and destruction. Mythology gives form to faith, translating the abstract into the tangible, the divine into the comprehensible, the eternal into the temporal. It is the language of symbols, narrating the timeless tales of the human spirit dancing with the cosmos' infinite possibilities. Yet, both faith and mythology are but reflections in the mirror of existence, shimmering illusions that hint at a reality far beyond our comprehension. They are the echoes of the universe whispering its secrets to those daring enough to listen, the gentle lullabies that soothe our existential anxieties, the sweet honey that makes the bitter pill of the unknown more palatable. They are not the ultimate answers to life's mysteries, but the beautiful questions that keep us seeking, exploring, and wondering. They are the compass and the map, guiding us on our endless quest for truth, reminding us that the journey, not the destination, is the essence of existence.

man’s will towards exceptionality. His quest for superiority and mastery over all other beings, including women. Until a human fetus is viable and can live and breathe in the world, it is a thing synonymous with woman, just as the walnut is part of the walnut tree. I know I’m working this tree metaphor a little hard here but, seriously . . . it is just so damn simple! The woman is the tree, dude! Her branches have been waving and waving all this time, shouting, “Up here!” while the patriarchal gaze looks right past her, unseeing, and projects its ego like a laser into her gut. War is mass murder, capital punishment is murder, murder is murder. Abortion is part of the eternal process of natural selection, one that women have been engaging in since

The hero is defined by his journey. A hero isn’t perfect. Every man has flaws that he must confront and overcome. That is the internal quest of the hero. And the eternal quest of literature

The greatest factor in achieving spiritual success is willingness. Jesus said, “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few.”12 People of the world seek the gifts of God, but he who is wise seeks the Giver Himself.

God gave freedom to man, and man has misused that freedom; this is the cause of all suffering.

The secret of effective prayer is to change your status from beggar to child of God; when you appeal to Him from that consciousness, your prayer will have both power and wisdom.

To develop will by yourself is extremely difficult. You require an example before you. If you would be an artist, surround yourself with good paintings and artists. If you would be a divine man, surround yourself with spiritual company.

He strayed across the sun worn grounds among old lichened monoliths, touching and tracing the inscriptions. The pains taken with the lettering astonished him—the knowing hands of nameless artisans, themselves long buried, incising stone calligraphies in memory of strangers. The age of these granites, hewn from crusts heaved up into the sun by planetary fire from miles beneath the surface of the earth, stirred him and humbled him. In quest of eternity, the upright stones yearned toward the firmament, even as they too were gnawed minutely by the bloodless fungi and blind algae that worked with the wind and rain to obliterate man's scratchings.

The aversion to knowledge and education is deeply rooted in Brazilian culture and is not exclusive to the elites. The pursuit of knowledge arises from the need to organize economic activity, protect the territory, propagate faith, and foster a national spirit, rather than as a quest to improve the general conditions of humanity. It serves merely as an effort to keep up with overall human progress and to favor the accumulation of wealth and exploitation. Here, knowledge is perceived as something unnatural and contrary to the eternal truths of faith, consolidated through the actions of the Church over the centuries of the country's development. The act of knowing is essentially regarded as a sin, seen as an escape from this Baroque Eden, maintained as a symbol of distinction, much like the whip's force was once used to indoctrinate. Distinction through knowledge is the exception; what truly holds value here is the "man-made-by-others": crude, ignorant, and violent, who enriched or distinguished himself through the efforts of others.