“Show us one, but one, gigantic spiritual genius growing out of all this dry dust of ignorance and fanaticism; and if you cannot, close your hearts to the clear light of truth, and sit like children at the feet of those who know what they are talking about.”

— Bhakti Yoga: The Yoga of Love and Devotion, p. 23

“Truth stands on its own evidence, and it does not require any other testimony to prove it true, it is self-effulgent. It penetrates into the innermost corners of our nature, and in its presence the whole universe stands up and says, this is truth.”

— Bhakti Yoga: The Yoga of Love and Devotion, p. 28

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

— This quote first appeared in print in Rev. Joseph Spence’s 18th century work Anecdotes, Observations and Characters, of Books and Men, where it is attributed to Newton, “a little before he died.” See here

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man … Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.”

— The World As I See It, chapter 1

“I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

— Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2.

“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms. This knowledge - This feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”

— I encountered the first line of this quote on pg. 164 of Amit Goswami’s God is Not Dead. The entire quote, and the citation of it coming from a 1954 talk, comes from Padma Sherab’s Yoga: Dance of the Gods

“If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do … is to study the words of those who were.”

— The Perennial Philosophy, Introduction pg. xi

“Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our experience.”

— The Divine Within a.k.a. Huxley on God, p. 193

“What is so precious in your life and about you that is worth exchanging the eternal for?
What are you holding onto so tightly that feels more valuable than the emptiness?
What are you clinging to inside your heart when even this body one day will leave?
What is so precious to you now that Truth is something left to be discovered later?
What can you not bear to separate from, knowing that one day all things will go?
What do you desire and what are you so attached to, that brings all this neediness, fear and mistrust of life?
Why can’t you trust that life can take better care of you than you can yourself?
What keeps you so loyal to personal identity and its delusions?
Has it all been worth it?”

— White Fire selection #446, p. 225

“Ignorance is the failure to discriminate between the permanent and the impermanent, the pure and the impure, bliss and suffering, the Self and the non-Self.”

— Chapter II verse 5 of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali as translated by Alistair Shearer

“What happened was, I got the idea in my head — and I could not get it out — that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping ㅡ and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge ㅡ when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway ㅡ is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly. [...] I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while ㅡ just once in a while ㅡ there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!”

— Franny and Zooey , “Zooey” (spoken by Franny) pgs. 146-147 [author’s emphasis]

“... education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness — satori — is to be with God before he said, Let there be light. Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny (at least as far as we were able), and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects — the arts, sciences, classics, languages — till you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light. We thought it would be wonderfully constructive to at least (that is, if our own "limitations" got in the way) tell you as much as we knew about the men — the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas — who knew something or everything about this state of being. That is, we wanted you both to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao-Tzu and Shankaracharya and Hui-neng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree or the definition of a peninsula or how to parse a sentence.”

— Franny and Zooey “Zooey” (letter from Buddy) pg. 65-66

“To realize our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental disease.”

— Tao Te Ching chapter 71; see here for a lovely collection of all the various translations of this passage

“Merely to cultivate the intellect, which is to develop capacity or knowledge, does not result in intelligence. There is a distinction between intellect and intelligence [or wisdom]. Intellect is thought functioning independently of emotion, whereas, intelligence is the capacity to feel as well as to reason; and until we approach life with intelligence, instead of intellect alone, or with emotion alone, no political or educational system in the world can save us from the toils of chaos and destruction.

Knowledge is not comparable with intelligence, knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not marketable, it is not a merchandise that can be bought with the price of learning or discipline. Wisdom cannot be found in books; it cannot be accumulated, memorized or stored up. Wisdom comes with the abnegation of the self. To have an open mind is more important than learning; and we can have an open mind, not by cramming it full of information, but by being aware of our own thoughts and feelings, by carefully observing ourselves and the influences about us, by listening to others, by watching the rich and the poor, the powerful and the lowly. Wisdom does not come through fear and oppression, but through the observation and understanding of everyday incidents in human relationship.”

— Education and the Significance of Life, chapter 3, pg. 52-3

“Thought is the response of memory that has been stored through knowledge; knowledge is gathered through experience. That is, experience, knowledge, memory stored in the brain, then thought, then action. This is our pattern of living, and the whole process is based on this movement. Man has done this for the last million years. He has been caught in the cycle, which is the movement of thought. And within this area, he has choice.

He can go from one corner to the other and say, ‘This is my choice, this is my movement of freedom’ — but it is always within the limited field of the known. And knowledge is always accompanied by ignorance because there is no complete knowledge about anything.

In our search for knowledge, in our acquisitive desires, we are losing love, we are blunting the feeling for beauty, the sensitivity to cruelty; we are becoming more and more specialised and less and less integrated. Wisdom cannot be replaced by knowledge. Knowledge is necessary, science has its place; but if the mind and heart are suffocated by knowledge, and if the cause of suffering is explained away, life becomes vain and meaningless.

Information, the knowledge of facts, though ever increasing, is by its very nature limited. Wisdom is infinite, it includes knowledge and the way of action; but we take hold of a branch and think it is the whole tree. Through the knowledge of the part, we can never realize the joy of the whole. Intellect can never lead to the whole, for, it is only a segment, a part.”

— Education and the Significance of Life, chapter 3, pg. 53-4

“I have never valued or studied the mere sophistry of word-knowledge, set down in books in conventionalized forms of questions and answers to be committed to memory (and fired off at one’s opponent); these lead but to mental confusion and not to such practice as bringeth actual realization of Truth.”

— Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan by W.Y. Evans-Wentz, p. 245

“I dedicate this biography of Milarepa to those who cling not to belief based upon books and tradition, but those who seek knowledge by realization.”

— dedication page of Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan by W.Y. Evans-Wentz

“Discuss it as you may, how can you even hope to approach the truth through words? Nor can it be perceived either subjectively or objectively. So full understanding can come to you only through an inexpressible mystery. The approach to it is called the Gateway of the Stillness beyond all Activity. If you wish to understand, know that a sudden comprehension comes when the mind has been purged of all the clutter of conceptual and discriminatory thought-activity. Those who seek the truth by means of intellect and learning only get further and further away from it. Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not til your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road.”

— The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind translated by John Blofeld, pg. 79-80

“It is never a question of belief; the only scientific attitude one can take on any subject is whether it is true.”

— Swami Sri Yukteswar as quoted by Paramahansa Yogananda in Autobiography of a Yogi

For an exploration of how space is no-thing but rather the essence of awareness, as discussed in the ep. 13 conversation with Shannon Lynn Smith, see chapter 8 of Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.

Here is one passage from that chapter:

“Space between thoughts is probably already arising sporadically in your life, and you may not even know it. A consciousness mesmerized by experiences and conditioned to identify exclusively with form, that is to say, object consciousness, finds it at first almost impossible to become aware of space. This ultimately mean that you cannot become aware of yourself, because you are always aware of something else. You are continuously distracted by form. Even when you seem to be aware of yourself, you have made yourself into an object, a thought form, and so what you are aware of is a thought, not yourself.

When you hear of inner space, you may start seeking it, and because you are seeking it as if you were looking for an object or for an experience, you cannot find it. This is the dilemma of all those who are seeking spiritual realization or enlightenment. Hence, Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”

If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to he sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or her... it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind. When this happens there is a sense of well­ being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient sages of India called ananda – the bliss of Being. Because you have been conditioned to pay attention only to form, you are probably not aware of it except indirectly. For example, there is a common element in the ability to see beauty, to appreciate simple things, to enjoy your own company, or to relate to other people with loving kindness. This common element is a sense of contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the invisible background without which these experiences would not be possible.”