Mystics

"The Absolute is not revealed through human effort. At the appointed time, presence simply begins merging in it. If you try to force this, you will bring the mind and person in again. It will seem as though the mind has accomplished something tremendous, but it will be a fake realisation, a mere mental state."

"Mind in its natural, intuitive function is a higher power than the personal mind mode. The natural mind operates in a much broader way. It is not obsessed with activity or identity. It is clean and clear, empty and fresh, so life simply unfolds. One stays in complete harmony without strain or effort. The natural mind is in a state of grace."

"The concept I am the body is the core belief we adopt very early on... We take ourselves to be a particular body with a unique personality, and this perspective remains with us as we live our lives."

"From a young age, we pick up many false assumptions about the world, about life, and about exactly who we are living life."

"Satsang comes in innumerable forms – sitting in the physical presence of a master, following the guidance offered in a book such as this, working in the garden, playing with your children. Once you have the eyes to see it, every movement of life itself is satsang, calling you home to your limitless Being.Welcome to satsang."

"Although I grew up in a Christian tradition, the wisdom of the Hindu saint Sri Ramakrishna was so universal that it touched and conquered my heart. His every word resonated deeply inside my being and was perfectly timed, as I had been waiting to find a voice that would confirm the profound experiences I had been having at the time. What I learned later was that Sri Ramakrishna was not only a great devotee – a bhakti saint – but also a completely liberated sage from the perspective and experience of the non-dual jnana path – the path of pure self-knowledge."

"We have become unaware of the magnificence of our true nature on account of our upbringing, conditioning, and education, all of which paint a very different picture of who we are – and all of which we believe."

"Here you are invited into the direct experience of that timeless reality through the method of self-inquiry, which forms the essence of this book."

"Meditation is the fast track to enlightenment. But, without mindfulness and insightful discrimination in everyday life, it’s is not enough."

"The whole of consciousness can be partitioned into two states that are never truly separate from each other, — a field of limitless and absolute silence, and its ingrained field of continually changing dynamic energy."

"The common mind and pure awareness are not the same. Pure awareness can exist beyond the linear limits of the mind, but the mind cannot exist without awareness."

"Today, you are that person you’re experiencing, — because of your past repetition of thoughts and actions. You can change that!"

"If you create an unconditional transcendental moment in the face of a shadow, then the self will bring forth a cure."

"What our world has accepted as normal is actually extreme limitation!"

"You can always choose between resistance or possibility. This simple choice determines the difference between failure or success. The secret rests in learning to listen without prejudice or predilection."

"Until you’ve truly connected with that inner transforming force in your Self, fear is more powerful in your life than love."

"Listening purely means allowing possibility to arise in the face of illusion."

"Everything you learned in the past is irrelevant, except for the wisdom that pertains to Now."

"Worship love not with a selfish want or with a half-guarded heart but with your whole being"

"I had sought to avoid the eristic disputes of religious rights and wrongs that are too often the driving subject of modern metaphysicians and spiritual pundits. My search was for a knowledge that stood above human opinion or the manufactured morals of differing societies. And while I understood that an uncorrupted knowledge might serve as a great purifier and a means to infer the truth of our existence, I intuitively knew that knowledge alone couldn’t give a truth seeker what he or she is ultimately seeking."

"Real compassion only comes about when we allow the emotional filters in our minds to fall silent, to permit the innermost Self to act as the prime conductor for our hearts, — then let the mind follow."

"To know the human heart you must make yourself defenseless to Love."

"Having no intention to do harm is the highest of our attractive virtues. Ahimsa, harmlessness, is a goodness anyone can strive for.” - from Master Amir in the book Immortal Self."

"Beyond the world we imagine as real rests a mysterious sea of endless possibility, a transcendental deep that acts as the womb for all manner of possibilities. These waters are the essential underside of our consciousness, our limitless resource, positioned to offer us our rightful bearing in life. But that bearing can only be realized when we genuinely agree to sacrifice our desires, abandon our guardedness, and capitulate to our natural inborn authenticity."

"Emotions are our victory or defeat indicators, the faces of our wants or fears, connected to an established or pursued after sense of self."

"Your spiritual life is that ongoing expression that arises through an inner connectedness to the source of your being, — which continually guides you into being transformed and elevated."

"Unlike what you may have been told or imagined, your life here is not just for you. You are intimately woven into the transcendental fabric and divinely intended welfare of all beings, simply because you exist."

"Do grant, O my Lord Jesus, that when my lips approach Thine to kiss Thee, I may taste the gall that was given Thee. And when my shoulders lean against Thine, make me feel Thy scourgings. And when my flesh is united with Thine in the Holy Eucharist, make me feel Thy Passion. And when my head comes near to Thine, make me feel Thy thorns. And when my heart is close to Thine, make me feel Thine embrace."

"When Mesmer arrived, Paris divided its allegiance between the Church which attributed all kinds of phenomena except its own divine miracles to the Devil, and the Academy, which believed in neither God nor Devil, but only in its own infallible wisdom. But there were minds which would not be satisfied with either of these beliefs... They had laid their legitimate desires at the royal feet, and the King forthwith commanded his learned Academy to look into the matter...."

"About 1780, Mesmer settled in Paris, and soon the whole metropolis, from the Royal family down to the last hysterical bourgeoise, were at his feet. The clergy got frightened and cried -- "the Devil"! The licensed "leeches" felt an ever-growing deficit in their pockets; and the aristocracy and the Court found themselves on the verge of madness from mere excitement. p. 25"

"The Academy disbelieved her most eminent Scientists and proclaimed Mesmerism a delusion... Even now when experiment has amply demonstrated that "Mesmerism" or animal magnetism, now known as hypnotism (a sorry effect, forsooth, of the "Breath of Cybele") is a fact, we yet get the majority of scientists denying its actual existence. Small fry as it is in the majestic array of experimental psycho-magnetic phenomena, even hypnotism seems too incredible, too mysterious, for our Darwinists and Haeckelians."

"Find that metal, wood, stone, or plant that has the most correspondential affinity with the body of the sufferer; and, whether through internal or external use, that particular agent imparting to the patient additional strength to fight disease -- (developed generally through the introduction of some foreign element into the constitution) -- and to expel it, will lead invariably to his cure. Many and marvelous were such cures effected by Anton Mesmer. p. 24"

"The secret of healing, he maintained, lies in the knowledge of correspondences and affinities between kindred atoms."

"In 1774 he too happened to come across the theurgic secret of direct vital transmission; and so highly interested was he, that he abandoned all his old methods to devote himself entirely to the new discovery. Henceforward he mesmerized by gaze and passes, the natural magnets being abandoned. The mysterious effects of such manipulations were called by him -- animal magnetism. This brought to Mesmer a mass of followers and disciples. The new force was experimented with in almost every city and town of Europe and found everywhere an actual fact."

"Ever since Mesmer's death at the age of eighty, in 1815, the French and English "Faculty," with some honorable exceptions, have ridiculed and denied the facts as well as the theories of Mesmer, but now, in 1890, a host of scientists suddenly agree, while wiping out as best they may the name of Mesmer, to rob him of all his phenomena, which they quietly appropriate under the name of "hypnotism," "suggestion," "Therapeutic Magnetism," "psychopathic Massage," and all the rest of it. p. 28"

"The church of Rome has never been either credulous or cowardly, as is abundantly proved by the Machiavellism which marks her policy. Moreover, she has never troubled herself much about the clever prestidigitateurs whom she knew to be simply adepts in juggling. Robert Houdin, Comte, Hamilton and Bosco, slept secure in their beds, while she persecuted such men as Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and Mesmer, the Hermetic philosophers and mystics—and effectually stopped every genuine manifestation of an occult nature by killing the mediums. p. 100"

"Theophrastus Paracelsus rediscovered the occult properties of the magnet—“the bone of Horus” which, twelve centuries before his time, had played such an important part in the theurgic mysteries—and he very naturally became the founder of the school of magnetism and of mediaeval magico-theurgy. But Mesmer, who lived nearly three hundred years after him, and as a disciple of his school brought the magnetic wonders before the public, reaped the glory that was due to the fire-philosopher, while the great master died in a hospital! So goes the world : new discoveries, evolving from old sciences ; new men—the same old nature! p. 71/2"

"I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred an fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest."

"In the large curative establishment founded by Mesmer at Vienna, he employed, besides magnetism, electricity, metals and a variety of woods. His fundamental doctrine was that of the Alchemists. He believed that metals, as also woods and plants have all an affinity with and bear a close relation to, the human organism. Everything in the Universe has developed from one homogeneous primordial substance differentiated into incalculable species of matter, and everything is destined to return thereinto."

"You are at the head of the committee which the government sent to M. d'Eslon's house, in order to witness the evidence of my discovery, and to judge its efficacy. When Mr. d'Eslon approached me and when I saw fit to let him glimpse a few elements of the system of my knowledge, I made him give his word of honor that he would never make public, without first having obtained my permission, the small number of new ideas that I might confide in him. M. d'Eslon has since signed a statement in which he recognizes that animal magnetism is my property, and that to make use of it without my consent is to be guilty of an offense as odious as it is punishable. However, in spite of his oaths and the statement which he signed, M. d'Eslon has not only dared to use my property for himself, but he has found men who were not afraid to share the spoils of my discoveries with him. Thirty-six doctors, from what I have been told, came to him looking for a system of knowledge about which he should be silent, and which he could not impart to them without breaking a code of honor... Like you, Monsieur, the world is my judge; and if the good that I have done can be forgotten, and the good that I wish to do can be obstructed, then I will have posterity to avenge me."

"It is a question of relativity. In order to understand it more clearly we must cleanse our minds of old ideas instilled into us by false education, both religious and scientific, and philosophic too (Ch 2)"

"Yet the majestic philosophy-science-religion of the ages teaches us that there are beings so much greater and higher than man is, and beings so much smaller and less than he, that in reality he himself in turn stands in his world and cosmos as the one or the other of these extremes to such greater or smaller entities. (Ch 2)"

"The psychology of the times following the publication of Darwin's works was so strong that most thinking men could not then be brought to admit that there were any alternative explanations of the phenomena of progressive development in life — human, animal, or plant life — to the scheme of transformism which he set forth. (Ch 3)"

"Among the most momentous questions that every thinking person asks are: Where do we come from? Who are we? And where do we go at death?...It is questions like these that occur to the thinking mind when it also reflects upon the nature, origin, and destiny of the worlds which bestrew the spaces of infinitude. Whence came they? What are they? What is their destiny? They are questions which must have answers. The mere fact that these things are, shows that there are answers to be had somewhere. (Chapter 1)"

"The Pathway of Beauty, the Pathway of Peace and Strength, the Pathway of the Great Quiet, is within. This is the Pathway that the great Sages and Seers of all the ages have taught. Follow that Pathway. It will lead you to the heart of the Sun, the Master and Guide of our Solar System. And later, if you follow it, it will conduct you to a destiny still more sublime. Yet that sublime destiny is only the beginning, only the beginning of something grander; for evolution, growth, expansion of consciousness, go on for ever..."

"Man is a mystery, a mystery to the investigating mind of the researcher into nature; but more so indeed is man a mystery to himself. Yet there is a solution of this mystery — a solution which is not new, which is older than the enduring hills. (Ch 2)"

"This psychological phenomenon was brought about mainly by the efforts of two men... Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. Both were fervent Darwinists... These two men were exceedingly able; but they spoke with the voice of authority on subjects which they themselves, in many particulars, were merely guessing at. These conclusions are not mine alone. They are also the conclusions of many scientific researchers and thinkers of today. (Ch 3)"

"Now there are two ways for a man to achieve his destiny, two ways for a human soul to reach its own inner powers, the full expansion of its own god-like genius. The first is that followed by the majority, drifting along like flotsam on the ceaselessly moving ebb and flow of the Ocean of Time; and this is the path of natural evolution, of natural growth. But oh! how slow, how slow, how slow it is! Ages will pass before the expansion of inner faculties and powers reaches even a modicum of a larger greatness. The other pathway is Initiation. This means a quicker growth, a more rapid evolution, a more speedy emergence from the chrysalis of humanhood into possessing the wings of the spirit - into becoming the bird of eternity, to change the metaphor somewhat. p. 70"

"Every Theosophical movement throughout the ages has been founded in order to bring back to man the realization of that which is essentially man's, to awaken in his heart his spiritual instincts, to light the divine fire anew in his soul, so that, inflamed with its glory, he may press onwards, find this pathway, and in following it to its end -which is indeed no end, for it is endless - may reach the realization by individual experience of his complete oneness with the Universe of which he is a child. That Universe is you. Every part of it is yours. It is your eternal Home and your everlasting Dwelling-place. There you are native; and not only are you, each one of you, the heart of the Universe, but that Universe itself verily is you yourself in your inmost. p. 48"

"You can gain wonderfully just by cultivating a few simple rules of mental and practical conduct. Be kindly; refuse to hate. Learn to love; learn to forgive. Let your heart expand. Be yourself, and expand your sympathies; touch with the tendrils of your consciousness the hearts of other human beings. Oh! what a delight to feel, as it were, the inner spiritually electrical quiver that your own soul experiences when you have touched the heart of a fellow human being! Practising these rules of morals and of noble ethics, you begin a short cut to a comprehension of yourself, and ultimately you touch the mysteries of the Universe. p. 73"