“It is that one Reality which appears to our ignorance as a manifold universe of names and forms and changes. Like the gold of which many ornaments are made, it remains in itself unchanged. Such is Brahman, and That art Thou. Meditate upon this truth.”

- from The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, p. 76
translated by Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood, 1975

“For if Life were questioned a thousand years and asked: “Why live?” and if there were an answer, it could be no more than this: “I live only to live!” And that is because Life is its own reason for being, springs from its own Source, and goes on and on, without ever asking why - just because it is life.”

- Meister Eckhart from his Sermons; as quoted on p. 69 of Meister Eckhart, from Whom God Hid Nothing, Edited by David O’Neal, 1996

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

- Matthew 18:3

“Neither the universe nor anything in the universe ‘means’ anything. Its existence is its meaning. The mind is accustomed to obtaining, getting, deriving, or discovering meaning or information. In the state of enlightenment, all is self-revealing of its essence as its existence. Everything already is what it ‘means’.”

- I: Reality and Subjectivity (2003), p. 347

“Many religions teach what God is not in the form of misunderstanding and distortions of truth that occur because of the ego’s misinterpretations and projection of anthropomorphic perceptions …
That which is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent is not vulnerable to threat or emotional upset; thus, God is not prone to revenge, jealousy, hatred, violence, vanity, egotism, or the need for adulation or compliments. The beneficiary of worshipping is the worshipper. God is totally and absolutely complete and has no needs or desires. God is not unhappy or upset if you have never heard of him or don’t believe in him.
Many of the old-world descriptions of God are actually reprehensible, and figments of man’s guilty projections of fear. Primitives thought that every storm meant that God was angry and needed sacrifices to calm down. Volcanoes also indicated that God was angry. The ego demands explanations and looks for ‘causes’. God was therefore rationalized to be the ‘cause’ of earthly events that created fear, such as earthquakes, famine, floods, pestilence, storms, drought, barrenness or ill health. God was considered the great punitive enforcer as well as the great rewarder … [The gods of old] represent the demonic gods of fear, hatred, jealousy, and retribution. The fear of God’s ‘righteous anger’ is still prevalent today.
God is not injured by anybody’s wrongdoing and therefore has no trauma to avenge. The image of God as a retaliatory, cruel punisher is hard to eradicate from one’s thinking. God is blamed for all that is actually the product of the ego itself. It is the ego that is the source of guilt, sin, suffering, condemnation, and creation of all the hells. It seeks salvation by blaming it all on God. It does so by turning God into His opposite. The gods of the lower regions are really demons. In actuality, God cannot be manipulated, cajoled, bargained with, or maneuvered into a position of being either a perpetrator or a victim. God is not codependent or neurotic and does not suffer from a paranoid psychosis with grandiosity.”

- The Eye of the I (2001), p. 149 - 151

‘Science says this: it says: grant me just one miracle … and we’ll explain all the rest. Grant me just this one miracle of how anything came into being, of how something came out of nothing, and thereby how all the laws of nature and the natural intelligence of the universe came into existence: grant me this inexplicable miracle of the fact of it happening … and we can take it from here.’

- Paraphrased from hearing it firsthand at a retreat called Be Still and Know: Practices in Silence & Discernment; to learn more about Swami and his life’s work, visit the Divine Grace Yoga Ashram website

"If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing without our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love."

- from Works of Love, p. 1

“Jean and I are living in Hawaii, and we’re living right by the ocean, and we have a little lanai, a little porch, and there’s a coconut tree that grows up through that porch, and it goes on up. And there’s a kind of vine plant … that has grown up the coconut tree. Now that plant sends forth little feelers that go out and clutch the plant, and it knows where the plant is and what to do and where the tree is. And it grows up like this and it opens a leaf and that leaf immediately turns to where the sun is. Now you can’t tell me that leaf doesn’t know where the sun is going to be. All of the leaves go just like that, what’s called heliotropism, turning toward where the sun is. That’s a form of consciousness.”

- from Joseph Campbell & the Power of Myth, ep. 1: “The Hero’s Adventure”

Dissecting the bird trying to find the song comes from folk singer John Craigie’s excellent song Dissect the Bird

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”

- New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 15

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.”

- attributed to Einstein by Gilbert Fowler White in Journal of France and Germany (1942–1944); see here

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.”

- from The Masnavi, Book IV, Story II
as translated in Masnavi I Ma'navi : The Spiritual Couplets of Maulána Jalálu-'d-Dín Muhammad Rúmí (1898) by Edward Henry Whinfield

“Admit, first of all, to your spiritual poverty. Confess to it. That's the starting point. Unless you have the guts to begin there, stark in your poverty and unashamed, you're never going to find your way out of the burrows.”

- Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) p. 26

“The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness is one and the same. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning, contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and Bolshevism, his spirit yearns for an answer that will allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty.”

“The various forms of religion no longer appear to the modern man to come from within - to be expressions of his own psychic life; for him they are to be classed with the things of the outer world. He is vouchsafed no revelation of a spirit that is not of this world; but he tries on a number of religions and convictions as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes.”

- both quotes from Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
Ch. 10: The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man - pgs. 211 & 206

“Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed every nation in a morass. Therefore it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got to do with gigantic economic programmes, with the so-called problems of reality? But I speak not to nations, only to the individual few, for whom it goes without saying that cultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this I need—because outside authority no longer means anything to me—a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche.”

- from Jung’s speech The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1933), Cologne, Germany