Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You’re not thinking about loving; you’re just being love, radiating like the sun.
I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.
In India, there's a way of seeing life as a cosmic play. It's called Lila. I can watch my life, and I can see my guru playing with me.
From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you.
I'm a Bhakti, meaning I practice devotional yoga and the heart and love, so I say to people, start with your ego and go down to your heart.
The way you come to fully appreciate the infusion of the Spirit is to more and more come fully into the moment, where this moment is enough.
I feel vulnerable because my mind - because of the stroke, my mind doesn't focus. And then I feel vulnerable because I don't understand the world around me.
The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.
The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain - to just be with it all.
We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.
When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.
I sit with people who are dying. I'm one of those unusual types that enjoys being with someone when they're dying because I know I am going to be in the presence of Truth.
The intellect is a beautiful servant but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.
The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself, rather, you are penetrating deep layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being.
The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.
Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.
Maharajji told me, 'Give up anger and I'll help you.' I found that love freed me back into the ocean of love and my righteous anger didn't do that. And I would rather be free than right.
Do what you can on this plane to relieve suffering by constantly working on yourself to be an instrument for the cessation of suffering. To me, that's what the emerging game is all about.
I have written and spoken my thoughts over many years. Now I'm on new ground and spirit. I want to bring these together. Things like karma yoga, bhakti yoga, conscious dying, conscious aging. Consciousness.
The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.
As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.
The stroke has given me another way to serve people. It lets me feel more deeply the pain of others; to help them know by example that ultimately, whatever happens, no harm can come. 'Death is perfectly safe,' I like to say.
In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.
Maharaj-ji, in my first darshan, my first meeting with him, showed me his powers. At that point I was impressed with the power. But subsequently, I realized that it was really his love that pulled me in. His love is unconditional love.
Many of us are caught in separateness and we look for love out there, out there. But then as we proceed inside there will be the love. The universe is an example of love. Like a tree. Like the ocean. Like my body. Like my wheelchair. I see the love.
The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out your attachment, your clinging, to pleasure, to pain, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there is a place where you’re vulnerable, the universe will find a way to confront you with it.
Pain is the mind. It's the thoughts of the mind. Then I get rid of the thoughts, and I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being. Then those particular thoughts that are painful - love them. I love them to death!
If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That's the entrance to Oneness. That's the space I entered when I met my guru.
We come into relationships often very much identified with our needs. I need this, I need security, I need refuge, I need friendship. And all of relationships are symbiotic in that sense. We come together because we fulfill each others' needs at some level or other.
In working with those who are dying, I offer another human being a spacious environment with my mind in which they can die as they need to die. I have no right to define how another person should die. I'm just there to help them transition, however they need to do it.
Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It's not 'I love you' for this or that reason, not 'I love you if you love me.' It's love for no reason, love without an object.
The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.
I've got to love the souls of people. Because I can't love every incarnation. I have to identify with my own soul. And then I can have such compassion for that soul who has an incarnation like George Bush. I feel compassion. That's karma of the here. Compassion and love, that's all.
I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking directly at me with unconditional love.
You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success- none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don't have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success - none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.
When you are in the presence of unconditional love, that is the optimum environment for your heart to open, because you feel safe, because you realize nobody wants anything from you. The minute that heart opens, you are once again letting in the flow. And that flow is where you experience God.
When I used to perform weddings, the image I always had was the image of a triangle, in which there are two partners and then there is this third force, this third being, that emerges out of the interaction of these two. The third one is the one that is the shared awareness that lies behind the two of them.
When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a wide range of reasons for people to be together and ways in which they are together. I see ways in which a relationship - which means something that exists between two or more people - for the most part reinforces people's separateness as individual entities.
When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It's a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.
The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back. In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight. When we see the Beloved in each person, it's like walking through a garden, watching flowers bloom all around us.
When you look back at your own life, you see ... the sufferings you went through, each time you would have avoided it if you possibly could. And yet, when you look at the depth of your character now, isn't a part of that a product of those experiences? Weren't those experiences part of what created the depth of your inner being?
The root of compassion is not empathy; that is kindness. Kindness is great, but it is not the ultimate compassion. Ultimate compassion relieves the suffering that comes from separateness. The suffering that comes from separateness is relieved only when you are fully present with another person, not when you are separately present.
I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.
After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don't have to change them. Things just change.
This is the pathless path - returning to where you were initially before you got lost. The deepest truth in you is where the journey leads - shedding, like taking off layers of an onion, until you come to your essence. The key to the spiritual journey is not acquiring something outside of yourself. Rather it is shedding the veils to come back to the deepest truth of your being.
In India when we meet and part we often say, "Namaste," which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us�.. "Namaste."
Souls love. That’s what souls do. Egos don’t, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you’ll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one. When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love. And don’t leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it’s all one. It’s one energy.
So somebody comes along and gets to me. They get me angry or uptight or they awaken some desire in me, wow am I delighted. They got me. And that’s my work on myself. If I am angry with you because your behavior doesn’t fill my model of how you should be, that’s my problem for having models. No expectations, no upset. If you are a liar and a cheat, that’s your Karma. If I’m cheated, that’s my work on myself.
The greatest thing you can do for another being is to provide the unconditional love that comes from making contact with that place in them that is beyond conditions, which is just pure consciousness, pure essence. That is, once we acknowledge each other as existing, just being here, just being, then each of us is free to change optimally. If I can just love you because here we are, then you are free to grow as you need to grow.