Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Atman (the Self), Oneness, Soul, Spirit

1. The soul is by its nature pure and perfect, infinite in power and blessed.

2. Never think there is anything impossible for the soul.

3. He who has realised the Atman becomes the storehouse of great power.

4. Know the Atman alone and give up all other vain words.

5. PROCLAIM THE GLORY OF THE ATMAN WITH THE ROAR OF A LION, and impart fearlessness unto all beings by saying “Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached”.

6. Believe that the soul is immortal, infinite, and all-powerful.

7. The soul has no sex; why should it degrade itself with sex ideas?

8. These are states, and states must ever change; but the nature of the soul is bliss, peace, unchanging. We have not to get it, we have it; only wash away the dross and see it.

9. All knowledge is in the soul.

10. Always talk and hear and reason about this Atman.

11. Atman (is) the aim of all.

12. Freedom is inseparable from the nature of the Atman. This is ever pure, ever perfect, ever unchangeable. This Atman you can never know. We can say nothing about the Atman but ‘not this, not this’.

13. There is no knowledge in nature; all knowledge comes from the human soul.

14. There is no distinction of sex in the soul.

15. Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is any sin, this is the only sin----------------------to say that you are weak, or others are weak.

16. Purest soul dispels ignorance, fear and weakness.

17. Everything in the universe is struggling to complete a circle, to return to its source, to return to its only real source, Atman.

The search for happiness is a struggle to find the balance, to restore the equilibrium.

Morality is the struggle of the bound will to get free and is the proof that we have come from perfection.

18. The goal of each soul is freedom, mastery-freedom from the slavery of matter and thought, mastery of external and internal nature.

19. Speak of this Atman to all.

20. Look not for the truth in any religion; IT IS HERE IN THE HUMAN SOUL, THE MIRACLE OF ALL MIRACLES-------------------------- IN THE HUMAN SOUL, THE EMPORIUM OF ALL KNOWLEDGE, THE MINE OF ALL EXISTENCE------------------------ seek here.

21. Mind you, the great benefit in this life is struggle. It is through that we pass. If there is any road to Heaven, it is through Hell. Through Hell to Heaven is always the way. When the soul has wrestled with circumstance and has met death, a thousand times death on the way, but nothing daunted, has struggled forward again and again and yet again-------------then the soul comes out as a giant and laughs at the ideal he has been struggling for, because he finds how much greater is he that the ideal.

22. ALL powers and ALL purity and ALL greatness----------------- EVERY THING IS IN THE SOUL.

23. Even this world, this body and mind are superstitions; WHAT INFINITE SOULS YOU ARE! And to be tricked by twinkling stars! It is a shameful condition. YOU ARE DIVINITIES; the twinkling stars owe their existence to you.

24. ONLY THE FOOLS RUSH AFTER SENSE-ENJOYMENTS. It is easy to live in the senses. It is easier to run in the old groove, eating and drinking; but what these modern philosophers want to tell you is to take these comfortable ideas and put the stamp of religion on them. Such a doctrine is dangerous. DEATH LIES IN THE SENSES. LIFE ON THE PLANE OF THE SPIRIT IS THE ONLY LIFE, LIFE ON ANY OTHER PLANE IS MERE DEATH; THE WHOLE OF THIS LIFE CAN BE ONLY DESCRIBED AS A GYMNASIUM. WE MUST GO BEYOND IT TO ENJOY REAL LIFE.

25. ALL KNOWLEDGE IS WITHIN US. ALL PERFECTION IS THERE ALREADY IN THE SOUL.

26. The spirit will triumph in the long run.

27. The spirit is reflected in mind and in everything.

28. Happiness is only found in the Spirit.

29. Spirit speaks unto spirit in silence, and yet in most unmistakable language.

30. To quicken the spirit, the impulse must come from another soul.

31. Let us worship the spirit in spirit, standing on spirit. Let the foundation be spirit, the middle spirit, the culmination spirit.

32. Man should hunger for one thing alone, the spirit, because spirit alone exists.

33. If your ideal is matter, matter shalt thou be. Behold! Our ideal is the spirit. That alone exists. Nothing else exists, and like Him we live for ever.

34. Stand upon the Self, then only can we truly love the world. Take a very, very high stand; knowing our universal nature, we must look with perfect calmness upon all the panorama of the world. It is but baby’s play, and we know that, so cannot be disturbed by it. If the mind is pleased with praise, it will be displeased with blame. All pleasures of the senses or even of the mind are evanescent, but within ourselves is the one true unrelated pleasure, dependent upon nothing. It is perfectly free, it is bliss. The more our bliss is within, the more spiritual we are. The pleasure of the Self is what the world calls religion.

35. Love all things only through and for the Self.

36. Do not injure another. Love everyone as your own self, because the whole universe is one. In injuring another, I am injuring my self; in loving another, I am loving myself.

37. Be one with the universe, be one with Him.

38. “Not I, but thou”----------say it, feel it, live it.

39. See God in everything and everywhere.

40. The seeing of many is the great sin of all the world. See all as Self and love all; let all idea of separateness go.

41. The god in you is the god in all. If you have not known this, you have known nothing. How can there be difference? It is all one. Every being is the temple of the most high; if you can see that, good, if not, spirituality has yet to come to you.

42. If we enjoy everything in the Self, and as the Self, no misery or reaction will come.

43. Seeing difference is the cause of all misery, and ignorance is the cause of seeing difference.

44. Happiness belongs to him who knows this oneness, who knows he is one with this universe.

45. Come out into the universe of light. Everything in the universe is yours, stretch out your arms and embrace it with love.

46. Love is simply an expression of this infinite unity.

47. Love binds, love makes for that oneness.

48. You are one with the universe.

49. We must not look down with contempt on others. All of us are going towards the same goal. The difference between the weakness and strength is one of degree; the difference between virtue and vice is one of degree; the difference between heaven and hell is one of degree; the difference between life and death is one of degree; all difference in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.

50. Good and evil are our slaves, not we theirs. Children finding glass beads in a mud puddle, that is the good of the world. Look at it with calm complacency; see good and evil as the same, both are merely ‘God’s play’; enjoy all.

51. There is but one basis of well-being, social, political or spiritual----------to know that I and my brother are one. This is true for all countries and all people.

52. All the differentiation in substance is made by name and form.

53. You and I are one.

54. Love makes no distinction between man and man.

55. The highest expression of love is unification.

56. Love binds, love makes for that oneness.

57. Stand up, men and women, in the spirit, dare to believe in the Truth, dare to practise the Truth! The world requires a few hundred bold men and women. Practise that boldness which dares know the truth, which dares show the truth in life, which does not quake before death, nay, welcomes death, makes a man know that he is the spirit, that in the whole universe, nothing can kill him. Then you will be free.

58. The Vedas say the whole world is a mixture of independence and dependence, of freedom and slavery, but through it all shines the soul independent, immortal, pure, perfect, holy.

59. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come, and everything that is excellent will come when this sleeping soul is roused to self-conscious activity.

60. To quicken the spirit, the impulse must come from another soul.

61. You must take off your mind from lust and lucre, must discriminate always between the real and the unreal--------------must settle down into the mood of bodiless ness with the brooding thought that you are not this body, and must always have the realisation that you are the all-pervading Atman.

62. Turn thy gaze inward, where resides the Paramatman.

63. All truth is eternal. Truth is nobody’s property; no race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all souls.

64. The worst lie that you ever tell yourself is that you were born a sinner or a wicked man. He alone is a sinner who sees a sinner in another man. Suppose there is a baby here, and you place a bag of gold on the table. Suppose a robber comes and takes the gold away. To the baby it is all the same, because there is no robber inside, there is no robber outside. To sinners and vile men, there is vileness outside, but not to good men. So the wicked see this universe as a hell, and the partially good see it as heaven, while the perfect beings realize it as God Himself. Then alone the veils fall from the eyes, and the man, purified and cleansed, finds his whole vision changed. The bad dreams that have been torturing him for millions of years, all vanish, and he who was thinking of himself either as a man, or a god, or a demon, he who was thinking of himself as living in low places, in high places, on earth, in heaven, and so on, finds that he is really omnipresent, that all time is in him, and that he is not in time; that all the heavens are in him, that he is not in any heaven, and that all the gods that man ever worshipped are in him, and that he is not in any one of those gods. He was the manufacturer of gods and demons, of men and plants, and animals and stones, and the real nature of man now stands unfolded to him as being higher than heaven, more perfect than this universe of ours, more infinite than infinite time, more omnipresent than omnipresent ether. Thus, alone man becomes fearless, and becomes free. Then all delusions cease, all miseries vanish, all fears come to an end for ever. Birth goes away, and with it death; pains fly, and with them fly away pleasures; earths vanish, and with them vanish heavens; bodies vanish, and with them vanishes the mind also. For that man the whole universe disappears, as it were. This searching, moving, continuous struggle of forces stops for ever, and that which was manifesting itself as force and matter, as struggles of nature, as nature itself, as heavens and earths and plants and animals and men and angels, and all that becomes transfigured into one infinite, unbreakable, unchangeable existence, and the knowing man finds that he is one with that existence. “Even as clouds of various colours come before the sky, remain there for a second and then vanish away,” even so before this soul are all these visions coming, of earths and heavens, of the moon and the gods, of pleasures and pains; but they all pass away, leaving the one infinite, blue, unchangeable sky. The sky never changes; it is the clouds that change. It is a mistake to think that the sky is changed. It is a mistake to think that we are impure, that we are limited, that we are separate. The real man is the One Unit Existence.

----------------------------THE REAL AND THE APPARENT MAN

65. Known, my soul, / you are Divine.

66. Throughout all religious systems and ideals is the same morality.

67. That which is nearest is least observed. The Atman is the nearest of the near, therefore the careless and the unsteady mind gets no clue to it. But the person who is alert, calm, self-restrained, and discriminating ignores the external world and, diving more and more into the inner world, realizes the glory of the Atman and becomes great.

68. The seeing of many is the great sin of all the world. See all as Self and love all; let all idea of separateness go.

69. Those who die, merely suffering the woes of life like cats and dogs, are they human beings? The worthy are those who, even when agitated by the sharp interaction of pleasure and pain, are discriminating and, knowing them to be of an evanescent nature, become passionately devoted to the Atman. This is all the difference between human beings and animals.

70. The spirit is the cause of all our thoughts and body-action, and everything, but it is untouched by good or evil, pleasure or pain, heat or cold, and all the dualism of nature, although it lends its light to everything.

71. The nearer we approach God, the more do we begin to see that all things are in Him.

72. The more a man advances towards oneness, the more ideas of “I” and “you” subside.

73. Oneness is the secret of everything.

74. We must not look down with contempt on others. All of us are going towards the same goal. The difference between the weakness and strength is one of degree; the difference between virtue and vice is one of degree; the difference between heaven and hell is one of degree; the difference between life and death is one of degree; all difference in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.

75. The Vedas cannot show you Brahman, you are That already; they can only help to take away the veil that hides the truth from our eyes. The first veil to vanish is ignorance, and when that is gone, sin goes, next desire ceases, selfishness ends and all misery disappears. This cessation of ignorance can only come when I know that God and I are one; in other words, identify yourself with Atman, not with human limitations. Disidentify yourself with the body and all will cease. This is the secret of healing. The universe is a case of hypnotization; dehypnotize yourself and cease to suffer.

76. The seeing of many is the great sin of all the world. See all as Self and love all; let all idea of separateness go.