Spiritual Quotes - Page 276

In tension you cannot perceive; in laxity you cannot perceive. Only if you are intense and relaxed, you perceive everything just the way it is.

One who is constantly resting within himself is capable of endless activity.

All beliefs will crash somewhere. Only reality will sustain itself.

If you see there is no meaning to anything that you are doing, your ego collapses; so you are trying to find all kinds of fake meanings.

Plain intellectual thinking is the peak of ignorance because all that you will know is to play with a few aspects and make others look like fools.

The spiritual process is always individual. You may sit in a group, but only the individual can evolve, only the individual can liberate himself.

The spiritual process has always been referred to as a journey - constant change.

Your body and your mind can be receptacles to perceive the whole cosmos - if only you do not identify yourself with them.

Are you here to experience life or think about it?

If you walk through life with ease and without any sense of entanglement, that is maturity.

When you exist here only as a body and a mind, suffering is inevitable.

We live in a world where it has become politically correct to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the straight and narrow glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

I think there's too much emphasis placed on learning things by rote that you don't really care about. So what happens to students in school is that they eventually lose interest in learning, because they've been forced to learn the required courses, rather than pursing their passion.

It is very possible to be proud of the spiritual gifts God has entrusted to us and to strut about ostentatiously, forgetting that we have nothing which we have not received, that grace is a gift, an undeserved favor. We can actually be filled with pride at the eloquence and brilliance of our sermon on humility.

And perhaps you thought, "Because I'm doing so much spiritual work, I'm only going to attract angels." No! The more spiritual work you do, the more darkness you attract. Because the light don't need more light. The darkness needs light! The light doesn't need more light.

I encourage people to have a daily spiritual practice; that's the best way to take care of yourself. If you have that daily practice, it means you're getting divine guidance, and you're not being guided by your ego or your personality.

Bowie's death is a very emotional thing. My generation of working-class Britain, it feels like we lost our spiritual leader, our guru. I always thought that if I was to be a hundred, somehow Bowie would be a hundred and fifteen. He'd be there to still steer me and guide me.

Like the bat, the Sufi is asleep to 'things of the day' - the familiar struggle for existence which the ordinary man finds all-important - and vigilant while others are asleep. In other words, he keeps awake the spiritual attention dormant in others. That 'mankind sleeps in a nightmare of unfulfillment' is a commonplace of Sufi literature

Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.

The experience of the ages that are past, the hopes of the ages that are yet to come, unite their voices in an appeal to us;– they implore us to think more of the character of our people than of its numbers; to look upon our vast natural resources, not as tempters to ostentation and pride, but as means to be converted by the refining alchemy of education into mental and spiritual treasures; ...and thus give to the world the example of a nation whose wisdom increases with its prosperity, and whose virtues are equal to its power.

The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.

I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves so that we can see - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture.

Not any particular religion or school of religion, but being an artist, you have to be spiritual, in a way.

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.