"... if there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location
in place or time; which will be infinite, like the God it will preach, and whose sun will
shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners, alike; which
will not be Brahminical or Buddhist, Christians or Mohammedan, but the sum total
of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will
embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for every human being, from the lowest
groveling savage, not far removed from the brute, to the highest man, towering by
the virtues of his head and heart almost above humanity, making society stand in
awe of him and doubt his human nature. It will be a religion which will recognize
divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force,
will be centered in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature."
— Swami Vivekananda
"Do you know what religion is? It is not the chant, it is not in the performance of puja,
or any other ritual, it is not in the worship of tin gods or stone images, it is not in the
temples and churches, it is not in the reading of the Bible or the Gita, it is not in the
repeating of a sacred name or in the following of some other superstition invented
by men. None of this is religion.
Religion is the feeling of goodness, that love which is like the river, living, moving
everlastingly. In that state you will find there comes a moment when there is no
longer any search at all; and this ending of search is the beginning of something
totally different. The search for God, for truth, the feeling of being completely good
— not the cultivation of goodness, of humility, but the seeking out of something
beyond the inventions and tricks of the mind, which means having a feeling for
that something, living in it, being it-that is true religion. But you can do that only
when you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life.
Then life has an astonishing way of taking care of you, because then there is no
taking care on your part. Life carries you where it will because you are part of itself;
then there is no problem of security, of what people say or don't say, and that is
the beauty of life."
Now look, there is nothing you can do to be liberated because all of your efforts in
the direction of liberation are phony. They are based on your desire to boost and
continue your ego and that will never lead to liberation. All you can do is to be aware
of yourself as you are without judgement. See What IS."
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Work on this hypothesis, and it's only a hypothesis at the moment, nothing more...
that space is you! Because you are equally inaccessible to inspection. When you look
to find out who you are, somebody like a zen master will interrupt you and say, 'Excuse
me, but who is it that wants to know, and who is it that is looking? Find out that.' So you
know you're sent chasing your own tail like a little dog, and you never catch up with it...
What you see outside you, and feel outside you, is the way YOU feel inside your skin.
Since all the optical images, shapes, and colors, and everything are neurological state's
in the brain. So what appears to you as outside is the most intimate feeling you have of
the inside of your head."
"You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you."
"Waking up to who you are require letting go of who you imagine yourself to be."
"We are all living in the same world, we think 'there is me and there is an external world
around me', but I am in your external world and you are in my external world, and if you
think about that, you see we are all in one world going along together. There isn't really
the internal and the external, there is simply the process. It's very important to get rid of
that illusion of duality, between the thinker and the thought. So find out, who is the thinker
behind thoughts, who is the real genuine YOU!?"
"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated,
and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life
bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to
vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that
myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from
the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably
old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations
of a single and eternal flow of energy."
— Alan Watts
"Human beings live and die; thoughts come and go; empires rise and fall; but only
love, is eternal."
"When the disciple becomes inwardly aware of the spiritual truths that underlie
religion, he will discover that he is one with all faiths - not because he has joined
them all, but because he has inwardly perceived the truth which sustains them all."
"Love is an experience of consciousness, an experience in the soul of man. It is some
thing that is a great releasing power against the tyranny of personal attitudes. It is
placing something bigger than one's self in the foreground of life. It is dedicating
one's acts to projects, to purposes, to convictions that are of common good to all
mankind.
Love is not just a single thing. It is not something that is born full-blown from the
unknown and the invisible.
To have a true understanding of love, the individual must grow. He must not only
outgrow selfishness and self-will, but he must also go above and beyond what might
be called the pressures of society upon his life. He has to be an individual. He has to
live his principles, whether others do or not.
Out of the cultivation of those gentle virtues which make possible true love, we are
also keeping faith with the great principles of integrity which support our world."
"We would like to find ways of breaking through the defensiveness which now
dominates a large part of conversation.
The individual has not only been disillusioned by prevailing situations, but has
become very highly defensive and even aggressive in his conversation.
We must not bring the individual to a state in which he knows it is no use saying
anything because it will only be used against him.
He must not be locked within a pattern of intolerances which deny him the right
to express himself or to examine the internal motives of others.
Words are a responsibility to be used wisely, and an opportunity to bring growth
and hope to other persons.
Our simplest words should bring hope.
Let our more common statements be charitable.
Let all our words reveal our faith in the wisdom of a divine providence.
If we put this leadership upon our own tongues we can do a great deal to make
this a better world for all of us."
"The whole world desires to be happy, it desires security and peach, it longs for
green pastures; but happiness must be earned. The stupid, the foolish, and the
selfish can never be happy. Any man who departs from wisdom departs from
peace. The law forbids that any man who is not intrinsically good shall enjoy
either wisdom or peace. Hence wisdom cannot be imparted to an idiot because
the seed of wisdom is not within him, but wisdom may be imparted to an
ignorant person, however ignorant he may be, because the seed of wisdom
exists in him and can be developed by art and culture."
— Manly P. Hall
"Do not be afraid of your difficulties. Do not wish you could be in other
circumstances than you are. For when you have made the best of an ad-
versity, it becomes the stepping stone to a splendid opportunity."
"There is no miracle. Everything that happens is the result of law -- eternal,
immutable, ever active."
"The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those
inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced
upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form
of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open
from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation:
is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?
Reason answers, 'there cannot be.' There is no room for absolute truth upon any
subject whatsoever, in a world as finite and conditioned as man is himself. But
there are relative truths, and we have to make the best we can of them."
— Mme Helena P. Blavatsky
"A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism."
"Many people are estranged from the occultist because love is not his outstanding
characteristic. The difference between his attitude and that of the lover of humanity
may be likened to the difference between the person who keeps animals as pets and
the one who breeds them for show purposes. The latter sets out to bring the species
to the highest degree of perfection of which it is capable, and with that end in view,
he is ruthless with the individual. The standard of training in the higher degrees is
very exacting and few achieve it; these few are those whom tradition regards as super-
human. But they are not super-human, they are human beings developed to the
highest pitch of which the human vehicle is capable. Such excellence in any walk of
life is obtained only as the reward of arduous labours, and these leave their mark on
the adept. He travels too fast for the average humanity, and they resent it; but of
those souls who delight in great adventure he is the chosen companion and beloved
friend."
— Dion Fortune
"Every Star has its own Nature, which is 'Right' for it. We are not to be missionaries,
with ideal standards of dress and morals, and such hard-ideas. We are to do what we
will, and leave others to do what they will. We are infinitely tolerant, save of intolerance."
"Everyone interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say something
which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain he either mis-
understands you, or doesn't understand you at all."
"It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men,
and its own judgments for absolute truth."
"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant
change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The
eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal."
"Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but
in all is the seal of unity."
"All you have to do is be yourself, do your will, and rejoice."
— Aleister Crowley
"The True Will is the will of the deepest inmost Self — the core of who you really are
as a spiritual being. Also, and importantly, it is an expression of the universal will,
as particularized and expressed in your individual life. This is why, when we are
living in accordance with our True Will, we find that much of the time the universe
seems to open up a path right in front of us, as if in sympathy with our aims.
Likewise, when we feel as though we are swimming upstream against life it is very
often the case that we have veered a bit from the path of our True Will; or perhaps
we're receiving a lesson from the Holy Guardian Angel and/or the universe itself
that is helping to nudge us back onto the path..."
— Dr. David Shoemaker
