Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, aka Gurudeva and Satguru

American Hindu Guru and Spiritual Leader

"To be affectionately detached is a power. That is a wisdom. That is a love greater than any emotional love, a love born of understanding."

"Anava, or ego, could seem like spirituality, but in reality it's only spirit-duality."

"A spiritual man always has to have the upper hand on the lower nature."

"Be happy with your achievements, which are done with willpower. That will help accomplish your goals and, further, give you confidence to carry out more tasks."

"At this time in the Kali Yuga, ignorance is equally distributed worldwide, and wisdom has become an endangered species."

"As your mind releases its desires and cravings, it releases the hold that it has on you. You dive deeper, fearlessly into this blazing avalanche of light, losing your consciousness. And as you come back into the mind, you see the mind for what it is, and you are free. You find that you are no longer attached because you see that the binder and the bound are one. You become the path. You become the way. You are the light."

"Be equal to whatever you meet! That is a better way to react to life. It is accomplished simply by meeting everything in understanding, by demanding understanding from within yourself."

"By changing our desires, we change our life. By changing our life, we change those around us."

"Character is "care actor," the ability to act with care."

"By disciplining your mind, body and emotions through sadhana, you come more and more into the inner knowing of yourself. You will first discover that when the breath is regulated, it is impossible for the thinking mind to run wild, and when the breath is slightly held, it is impossible for more than one thought to remain vibrating in the mind at a time. You will experience that when the nerve currents are quieted through diaphragmatic breathing, it is impossible to be frustrated, and it is possible to absorb within yourself, into the great halls of inner learning, into the great vacuum within you, all of your problems, troubles and fears, without having to psychoanalyze them."

"Consistency is the key to the conquest of karma."

"Desire is the force that drives humanity onward and through all phases of the mind. By changing our desires, we change our life. By changing our life, we change those around us."

"Draw awareness inward, toward the center. When you are elsewhere, you are in one place. When you are the center, you are everyplace."

"Even harsh karma, when faced in wisdom, can be the greatest catalyst for spiritual unfoldment. Performing daily s?dhana, keeping good company, pilgrimaging to holy places, seeing to others? needs?these evoke the higher energies, direct the mind to useful thoughts and avoid the creation of troublesome new karmas."

"Face each test graciously. Welcome each test and welcome each temptation that shows you the strength of your will over the chaotic senses."

"Everything is permanent, until it changes."

"Freedom, individualism and being yourself, so long as it does not hurt another's physical person or property. Only when man realizes the Self does he attain his full maturity and find completeness."

"For creative things, give time. For productive things, give goals."

"Even to hear about the Self is good and brings about good karma. Not many will be exposed to the Self."

"If anything goes wrong within a marriage, the blame should be on the man. He's the head of the house and should be responsible to ensure everything goes right."

"God Siva is Immanent Love and Transcendent Reality."

"I have always been a supporter of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

"Intelligence is finite, but stupidity knows no limits."

"If you are going to control your income, start by controlling your emotions."

"If you want to know how much you have progressed in your spiritual life, just look back and reflect on the changes."

"If you're standing up, it's confrontation. If you're sitting down, its conversation. On correcting people, including but not limited to children."

"Karma literally means ?deed? or ?act? and more broadly names the universal principle of cause and effect, action and reaction which governs all life. Karma is a natural law of the mind, just as gravity is a law of matter."

"I've always been a supporter of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

"It is a gift of God to see ourselves as others see us."

"Life is meant to be lived joyously."

"Listen for silence in noisy places; feel at peace in the midst of disturbance; awaken joy when there is no reason."

"Let your mind cognize itself by turning itself back on itself. Become consciously conscious. All you have to do is to watch your mind think."

"Love is the source of understanding. You know intellectually that within you resides the potential, expressed or not, for all human emotion, thought and action. Yet, you no doubt meet or observe people occasionally whose life and actions are repellent or unacceptable to you. The absence of love has created a vacuum of understanding. For the meditating person, there should not be a single human being whose actions, habits, opinions or conduct lies beyond your ability to love and understand. Try this. This week look at everyone you meet, and feel, from your fingertips right down to your toes, love welling up from your deepest resources and radiating out to them through every cell of your body and especially through your face. Say to yourself, ?I like you? ? and really feel it. There are many thousands of things that most people do not understand from their confused states of mind, and they therefore act in unseemly ways, due to the ignorance of past karma. Should their ignorance confuse you? Should it cloud your own understanding? Certainly not! We do not love the flower and hate the muddy roots from which it grew, and we cannot hate the instinctive roots of mankind."

"Money is cold, so you need to be cool, too, when you deal with it."

"Mystics walk away from an uncompromising situation. They don't stick around to make more karmas in this life."

"Make the mind always remain poised, like a hummingbird over a flower, so that you begin to live in the eternal now constantly, permanently."

"Man is not man, man is God."

"No man is my enemy. No man is my friend. All men are my teachers. Some teach me what to do, some teach me what not to do."

"Money is cold, so you need to be cool [in the sense of being dispassionately rational], too, when you deal with it."

"On corporal punishment of children: Anyone who beats my devotees beats me."

"Only when man realizes the Self does he attain his full maturity and find completeness."

"Sitting in a state of meditation, you must be more alive and alert than a tightrope walker suspended without a net on a taut cable three hundred feet above the surface of the Earth."

"People always tend to identify, instinctively, freedom with abandon. But the type of abandon that seeks personal gratification always gets you "tied up in a knot." Abandon instead your personal fears and desires...and you, the real you, will become freed, released from the bonds of your own mind."

"Siva is the Life of our life."

"Some people desire peace of mind so intensely that they never have peace of mind."

"The mind is vast in its combinations of time, space and form. It contains every vibration from subtle to gross."

"The mystery is no mystery to the mystic."

"The pilgrimage toward any experience starts with your first concept of it."

"The object in being on the spiritual path is not to have just a little influx of energy, but to be the energy itself - consciously."

"The purified, integrated mind, so perfected in its own understanding, lives in close communion with the soul radiance so that light becomes the constant companion of the mind."