This blogspot is a repository for the many sayings and quotes that I have collected in my readings and studies on the path toward spiritual awakening and self-transcendence. May it happen to each of us in this precious human life which we are experiencing. . . .
"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others. This is what everyone throughout the world is attempting to do. Truth is narrowed down and made a plaything for those who are weak, for those who are only momentarily discontented. Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you would attain to the mountain-top you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices."
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti --
August 2, 1929
In the following clip, spiritual pundit/philosopher, Ken Wilber, explains the truth of ages: that opting to walk a truly spiritual path - the path through a "pathless land" - towards higher consciousness and experiential knowledge of the Absolute is necessarily a lonely endeavour.
"If you want to find spirituality," wrote philosopher, Paul Brunton, "you must find it while living in the world, yet not being of it. In other words being inwardly detached and renounced, but outwardly living and enjoying as other people do, not held in your heart by material things, not mentally imprisoned by them, but able to renounce them at a moment's notice. If you can do this, you are free; you are no longer a slave."
The enlightened modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, made the observation that Rene DesCartes (the father of the 'empirical rationalism' that drives modern science) got it completely wrong in his most basic statement: "Cognito, ergo summa;" or, "I think, therefore I am."
Objectively, DesCartes' famous dictum may be true; but subjectively, it is perhaps wholly wrong. As Tolle and so many rishis and sages of all ages and continents before him have pointed out, our "thinking without awareness" is the main dilemna of human existence. It is the root cause of all suffering.
Men and women get themselves confused with, caught up in, and identify themselves with, the restless inner dialogue of the human ego and then act upon it, usually to the detriment of others and always to the ultimate detriment of themselves.
Our usual mode of constant egoic thinking combined with an "outer" rather than "inner" religious worldview, and the sure-fire conviction that our exoteric religious beliefs are the only right and valid views, has been the chief source of man-made violence and death for millenia untold, and it continues to be so, as philosopher Ken Wilber has pointed out.
And yet, the "inner" or "esoteric" spiritual path that is present but largely ignored in most wisdom traditions is one of the few - and may be the only - way out of humanity's individual and collective suffering, as Wilber has concluded.
As the renowned Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, observed in one of his letters that makes for the substance of the embedded video (below), the inner, contemplative path, rather than mere intellection and the application of reason, is the essence of all wisdom traditions.
To this effect, Merton notes:
"Oh, my Brother! The contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim-carrying God in his chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust; that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness, in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist."
In explaining what 'contemplation' and the 'contemplative life,' are, Merton notes that contemplation is "a more profound depth of faith; a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images or words, or even in clear concepts." He observes:
"Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source.
Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond both reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete."
"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away . . ."
-- Revelations 21:1 --
The Book of Revelations is perhaps the most understood work in the entire New Testament. First, it is the revelation of a dream which the Apostle John reportedly had; and, second, it, like the rest of the New Testament, deals with thought rather than future events. And, perhaps, the well known verse of "a new heaven and a new earth," to me, aptly describes how our perceptions and 'world-view' are radically shifted when we let go of that near-universal affliction, the human "ego" - not "ego" as in pride, but "ego" denoting the sense of individuality and "separateness" that Einstein referred to as "an optical delusion of consciousness."
Nearly every individual has "two selves" - the small, false "self" of the ego, and the real, expansive "Self" of our true being. It is when, through spiritual practice, 'self' gives way to 'Self' that "a new heaven and a new earth" manifest in our consciousness. We then become, or are becoming, a part of the Whole, a part of the 'Ground of Being,' a part of the "new earth." (It is no mere coincidence that the best-selling spiritual author, and enlightened teacher, Eckhart Tolle, titled one of his books, "A New Earth.")
The renowned 20th-century theologian, Paul Tillich, talks about our two "selves' and the 'reality' of St. John's "new earth"' in the following passage from his book of sermons, "The Shaking of the Foundations," pp. 100-101:
"Where can we feel this new reality? We cannot find it, but it can find us. It tries to find us during our whole life. It is in the world; it carries the world; and it is the cause of the fact that our Self and our world are not yet thrown into utter self-destruction. Although it is hidden under anxiety and despair, under finitude and tragedy, it is in everything, in souls and bodies, because everything derives life from it. The new being means that the old being has not yet destroyed itself completely; that life is still possible; that our souls still gather force to go forward; and that the good and the true are not extinguished. It is present, and it will find us. Let us be found by it. It is stronger than the world, although it is quiet and meek and mild."
The "new earth" is a profound psychological metaphor for the change in our attitudes and conceptions - indeed, the change in our entire mode or way of thinking - as we shift from a narrow self-consciousness to an expansive and inclusive higher consciousness. The following video interview with Father Thomas Keating by integral theorist Ken Wilber amply illustrates this shift in perceptions and attitudes, as well as its implications for personal and collective well-being.
