Great Throughts Treasury

"Therefore we have to engage ourselves in occupational engagements that will evoke our divine consciousness. This is possible only by hearing and chanting the divine activities of the Supreme Lord…" - Shrimad Bhagavatam, or the Bhâgavata Purâna, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, or Bhāgavata NULL

"In the Immutable, infinite Supreme Brahman remain hidden the two: knowledge and ignorance. Ignorance leads to worldliness and knowledge, to Immortality. Brahman, who controls both knowledge and ignorance, is different from both." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"Rudra is truly one; for the knowers of Brahman do not admit the existence of a second, He alone rules all the worlds by His powers. He dwells as the inner Self of every living being. After having created all the worlds, He, their Protector, takes them back into Himself at the end of time." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"The Self, smaller than the small, greater than the great, is hidden in the hearts of creatures. The wise, by the grace of the Creator, behold the Lord, majestic and desireless and become free from grief." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"When there is no darkness of ignorance, there is no day or night, neither being nor non-being; the pure Brahman alone exists. That immutable Reality is the meaning of "That"; It is adored by the Sun. From It has proceeded the ancient wisdom." - Shvetashvatara Upanishad

"Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique." - Simone Weil

"Let go of old habit patterns that keep you trapped in dissatisfaction and frustration" - Stephan Bodian

"Providence would seem to sleep unless faith and prayer awaken it. The disciples had but little faith in their Master's accounts, yet that little faith awakened him in a storm, and he relieved them. Unbelief doth only discourage God from showing his power in taking our parts." - Stephen Charnock

"A summer breeze can be very refreshing; but if we try to put it in a tin can so we can have it entirely to ourselves, the breeze will die. Our beloved is the same. He is like a breeze, a cloud, a flower. If you imprison him in a tin can, he will die. Yet many people do just that. They rob their loved one of his liberty, until he can no longer be himself. They live to satisfy themselves and use their loved one to help them fulfill that. That is not loving; it is destroying." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Every thought you produce, anything you say, any action you do, it bears your signature." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Mindful breathing is the vehicle that you use to go back to your true home where you meet the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Mindful breathing brings you home--it generates the energy of mindfulness in you. Mindfulness is the substance of a Buddha." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. A pessimistic attitude can never create the calm and serene smile which blossoms on the lips of Bodhisattvas and all those who obtain the way." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"We should be treated with great respect, great affection and compassion. It is very important to treat our bodies with the utmost respect, with understanding, with compassion. If you know how to treat your body and your feelings with such respect, you will also be able to treat another person with the same respect and that is how we build peace." - Thich Nhất Hanh

"Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is that the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure forever the way of his future desire. And therefore the voluntary actions and inclinations of all men tend not only to the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life, and differ only in the way, which ariseth partly from the diversity of passions in diverse men, and partly from the difference of the knowledge or opinion each one has of the causes which produce the effect desired." - Thomas Hobbes

""Self-liberation" is what the Buddhist path is about; it's seeing through the illusion of a separate self and that, I think, attracted us a lot because we were burdened with too much self-the land of individual license plates and special little monads of selfhood buzzing around." - Wes Nisker, fully Wes "Scoop" Nisker

"As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all." Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"I dwell apart by the River Qi, where the Eastern wilds stretch far without hills. The sun darkens beyond the mulberry trees; the river glistens through the villages. Shepherd boys depart, gazing back to their hamlets; hunting dogs return following their men. When a man's at peace, what business does he have? I shut fast my rustic door throughout the day." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"Old age think good quiet. Everything not concern heart. Self attend without great plan. Empty know return old forest. Pine wind blow undo belt. Hill moon light pluck qin. Gentleman ask end open reason. Fisherman song enter riverbank deep. Now in old age, I know the value of silence, the world's affairs no longer stir my heart. Turning to myself, I have no greater plan, all I can do is return to the forest of old. Wind from the pine trees blows my sash undone, the moon shines through the hills; I pluck the qin. You ask me why the world must rise and fall, fishermen sing on the steep banks of the river." - Wang Wei, aka Wang Youcheng

"Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little." - Washington Irving

"The taste of the English in the cultivation of land, and in what is called landscape gardening, is unrivalled. They have studied nature intently, and discover an exquisite sense of her beautiful forms and harmonious combinations. Those charms which in other countries she lavishes in wild solitudes are here assembled round the haunts of domestic life. They seem to have caught her coy and furtive graces, and spread them, like witchery, about their rural abodes." - Washington Irving

"Emotions show up in your body as physical manifestations of your thoughts." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"Tapping into the essence of originating Spirit, emulating the attributes of the creative force of intention, and manifesting into your life anything that you desire that's consistent with the universal mind..." - Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer

"The practice of non-meditation is ceasing to be the see-er, hearer or speaker while eyes, ears and mouths are fulfilling their function in daily life." - Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray

"Meditation is meeting eternity in the present moment. It is resolving every problem as it comes. It is resolving every tension as it creeps in. It is facing the challenges of life in a non-fearful way." - Vimala Thakar

"Self-education begins by watching how we are using the energy and learning how not to waste it through." - Vimala Thakar

"Viewing the world as a large pieced-together collection of fragments, some of which are labeled as friend and others as foe, begins internally. We map out our internal territories with the same positive or negative designations as we do external territories, and wars go on there as they do in the world. Internally, we are divided against ourselves; the emotions want one thing, the intellect another, the impulses of the body yet another, and a conflict takes place which is no different in quality, although it is in scale, from that of the world wars. If we are not related to ourselves in wholeness, is it any surprise that we cannot perceive the wholeness of the world? If we believe ourselves each to be a patched-together, unmatched assortment of desirable and undesirable features, motives at odds with each other, undigested beliefs and prejudices, fears, and insecurities, will we not project all this on the world?" - Vimala Thakar

"Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science or complement of sciences exclusively occupied with mind." - William Hamilton, fully Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet

"Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator." - William Law

"When you keep company with an eminent master, his qualities will automatically influence you." - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"When you recognize the nature of mind, fabrication and effort are naturally freed." - Padmasambhava, literally "Lotus-Born",aka "Second Buddha", better known as Guru Rinpoche (lit. "Precious Guru") or Lopon Rinpoche NULL

"It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, Allah, Allah, Allah, God God, God. That's God, you know." - Elizabeth Gilbert

"Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living." - Elizabeth Lesser

"One of my heroes is the clown-activist, Wavy Gravy. He is best known for a role that he played in 1969, when he was the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock festival. Since then, he's been a social activist, a major "fun-d" raiser for good causes, a Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor, an unofficial hospital chaplain, and the founder of a children's camp for inner city kids. Every four years he campaigns as a candidate for president of the United States, under the pseudonym of Nobody, making speeches all over the country, with slogans like "Nobody for President," "Nobody's Perfect," and "Nobody Should Have That Much Power." He's a seriously funny person, and a person who is serious about helping others. "Like the best of clowns," wrote a reporter in The Village Voice, "Wavy Gravy makes a big fool of himself as is necessary to make a wiser man of you. He is one of the better people on earth." Wavy (I'm on a first-name basis with him from clown workshops he's offered at Omega) is a master of one-liners, like the famous one he delivered on the Woodstock stage: "What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000;" and this one, on why he became a clown: "You don't hear a bunch of bullies get together and say 'Hey, let's go kill a few clowns.'"But my all-time favorite Wavy-ism is the line above about Bozos on the bus, one he repeats whenever he speaks to groups, whether at a clown workshop or in a children's hospital. I have co-opted the phrase and I use it to begin my workshops, because I believe that we are all bozos on the bus, contrary to the self-assured image we work so hard to present to each other on a daily basis. We are all half-baked experiments-mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. None of us are models of perfect behavior: We have all betrayed and been betrayed; we've been known to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night worrying about everything from money to kids to terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines. In other words, we're all bozos on the bus. This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration. If we're all bozos, then for God's sakes, we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-type beings without the usual embarrassment and resistance. It is so much more effective to work on our rough edges with a light and forgiving heart. Imagine how freeing it would be to take a more compassionate and comedic view of the human condition - not as a way to deny our defects-but as a way of welcoming them as part of the standard human operating system. Every single person on this bus called Earth hurts; it's when we have shame about our failings that hurt turns into suffering. In our shame, we feel an outcast, as if there is another bus somewhere, rolling along on a smooth road. Its passengers are all thin, healthy, happy, well-dressed and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that never bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things, or goofy things like forget where they parked their car, lose their wallet, or say something totally inappropriate. We long to be on that bus with the other normal people. But we are on the bus that says BOZO on the front, and we worry that we may be the only passenger on board. This is the illusion that so many of us labor under- that we're all alone in our weirdness and our uncertainty; that we may be the most lost person on the highway. Of course we don't always feel like this. Sometimes a wave of self-forgiveness washes over us, and suddenly we're connected to our fellow humans; suddenly we belong. It is wonderful to take your place on the bus with the other bozos. It may be the first step to enlightenment to understand with all of your brain cells that the other bus - that sleek bus with the cool people who know where they are going - is also filled with bozos - bozos in drag; bozos with a secret. When we see clearly that every single human being, regardless of fame or fortune or age or brains or beauty, shares the same ordinary foibles, a strange thing happens. We begin to cheer up, to loosen up, and we become as buoyant as those people we imagined on the other bus. As we rumble along the potholed road, lost as ever, through the valleys and over the hills, we find ourselves among friends. We sit back, and enjoy the ride." - Elizabeth Lesser

"Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas

"For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture." - Ernest Becker

"Do not be caught up in materialism, one of the real plagues of our generation-that is, acquiring things, fast-paced living, and securing career success." - Ezra Taft Benson

"The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people." - Ezra Pound, fully Ezra Weston Loomis Pound