centered thoughts
July 1996
What we accumulate around us from day to day, our 'possessions' are really our 'burden' to the extent which we become attached to them. They are really but impermanent 'things', even as our physical bodies are. The only permanent thing in the kosmos is the Unknowable, That, God. That which is beyond even our understanding but which remains our constant goal -- the goal of good for the benefit of creation. Not that we should divest what we have, but that we should realize its purpose and rise above its ensnarement, in order to work to benefit Humanity to realize its latent god-like potential. -- PNT
Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs, the wise can draw in their senses at will. -- Bhagavad Gita
This erring race of human beings dreams always of perfecting their environment by the machinery of government and society; but it is only by the perfection of the soul within that the outer environment can be perfected. What thou art within, that outside thee thou shalt enjoy; no machinery can rescue thee from the law of thy being. -- Sri Aurobindo
To see a man fearless in dangers, untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body. -- Seneca
[Some people] feel an irresistible attraction toward...the Higher Life, and yet are too personal and self-opinionated, too much in love with the deceptive allurements of mundane life and the world's ephemeral pleasures, to give them up; and so lose their chance [of progressing any farther] in the present birth. -- H.P. Blavatsky
Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs. -- Thoreau
It is therefore no question of our likes and dislikes: advance we must, seeking within ourselves the secret of our god-selves which sing to us eternally through the silence. If the meaning and the music of the song be lost before it reaches our hearing, it is because our thoughts are too full of the things of death and because we are weighed down by needless burdens and grow old in our youth with wrong thinking, filling our minds with desires that emanate from selfishness and allowing them to accumulate until they, and not we, become the living force behind our actions. -- Katherine Tingley
I suggest we are thieves in a way. If I take anything that I do not need for my immediate use, and keep it, I thieve it from somebody else. I venture to suggest that it is the fundamental law of Nature, without exception, that Nature produces enough for our wants from day to day, and if only everybody took enough for himself and nothing more, there would be no pauperism in this world, there would be no man dying of starvation in this world. But so long as we have got this inequity, so long we are thieving. I am no socialist and I do not want to dispossess those who have got possessions: but I do say that, personally, those of us who want to see light out of darkness have to follow this rule. I do not want to dispossess anybody. I should then be departing from the rule of ahimsa. If somebody else possess more than I do, let him. But so far as my own life has to be regulated, I do say that I dare not possess anything which I do not want...The only statement that has to be examined is, whether it can be laid down as a law of universal application that material advancement means moral progress. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. -- Janis Joplin