Inspiring quotes from hinduism and other sources

Sri Ramakrishna (to M.) — Aha! What devotion the gopis had! They would get seized with the madness of love just on seeing the tamal tree. Such was the fire of separation burning in the heart of Srimati, that tears from her eyes would dry up with its heat ­- they would just evaporate. At times people wouldn’t even know of Radha’s bhava. When an elephant enters a big lake, nobody comes to know of it.

M. — Yes sir, it was the same with Gauranga (Chaitanya Deva). On seeing a forest he thought that he was in Vrindavan, on seeing the ocean he thought it was Yamuna.

Sri Ramakrishna — Aha! If just a drop of this prema could fall to the share of a person! What a devotion! What a love! Not only sixteen annas (full complement) love but five sikas and five annas! This is called love intoxication. The basic thing is to love Him, to have longing for Him. Then you may take the path you like. Whether you believe in God with form or God without form, whether you believe that Bhagavan incarnates Himself as a man or not, it is enough if you have devotion for Him. He will then Himself tell you what He is like.

“If you must be mad, be not so with the things of this world. Be mad for the Lord!”

http://www.kathamrita.org/kathamrita.htm

 

"Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? -- unless indeed you fail to meet the test!"-2 Corinthians 13:5

 

Whatever you do, make it an offering to me--the food you eat, the sacrifices you make, the help you give, even your suffering. In this way you will be freed from the bondage of karma, and from its results both pleasant and painful. Then, firm in renunciation and yoga, with your heart free, you will come to me.

-Bhagavad Gita 9:27-28

 

From ‘The Mother’ by Sri Aurobindo.



Mahasaraswati is the Mother's Power of Work and her spirit of perfection and order.



The youngest of the Four,(powers or aspects of the Mother) she is the most skillful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature.

Maheswari lays down the large lines of the world-forces, Mahakali drives their energy and impetus, Mahalakshmi discovers their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides over their detail of organization and execution, relation of parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude of result and fulfilment.

The science and craft and technique of things are Mahasaraswati's province. Always she holds in her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning eye of the perfect worker.

This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician, artisan and classifier of the worlds.

When she takes up the transformation and new building of the nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless.

For the will in her works is scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable; leaning over us she notes and touches every little detail, finds out every minute defect, gap, twist or incompleteness, considers and weighs accurately all that has been done and all that remains still to be done and all that remains still to be done hereafter.

Nothing is too small or apparently trivial for her attention; nothing however impalpable or disguised or latent can escape her.

Moulding and remoulding she labours each part till it has attained its true form, is put in its exact place in the whole and fulfils its precise purpose.

In her constant and diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things her eye is on all needs at once and the way to meet them and her intuition knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and successfully determines the right instrument, the right time, the right conditions and the right process.

Carelessness and negligence and indolence she abhors; all scamped and hasty and shuffling work, all clumsiness and 'à peu près' and misfire, all false adaptation and misuse of instruments and faculties and leaving of things undone or half done is offensive and foreign to her temper.

When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten, no part has been misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty condition; all is solid, accurate, complete, admirable.

Nothing short of a perfect perfection satisfies her and she is ready to face an eternity of toil if that is needed for the fullness of her creation.

Therefore of all the Mother's powers she is the most long-suffering with man and his thousand imperfections.

Kind, smiling, close and helpful, not easily turned away or discouraged, insistent even after repeated failure, her hand sustains our every step on condition that we are single in our will and straightforward and sincere; for a double mind she will not tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to drama and histrionics and self-deceit and pretence.

A mother to our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil counsellor and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile the clouds of gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding always of the ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine, she is firm, quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge that drives towards the integrality of the higher nature.

All the work of the other Powers leans on her for its completeness; for she assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of detail and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.

 

Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.

-Ramakrishna

 

God, you are my God, I pine for you;
my heart thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
as a land parched, dreary and waterless.
Thus I have gazed on you in the sanctuary,
seeing your power and your glory.

Better your faithful love than life itself;
my lips will praise you .
Thus I will bless you all my life,
in your name lift up my hands.
All my longings fulfilled as with fat and rich foods,
a song of joy on my lips and praise in my mouth.

On my bed when I think of you,
I muse on you in the watches of the night,
for you have always been my help;
in the shadow of your wings I rejoice;
My heart clings to you,
your right hand supports me.

Psalm 63

 

Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of Thee; Thou only knowest what I need; Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. O Father! Give to Thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. I dare not ask either for crosses or consolations; I simply present myself before Thee, I open my heart to Thee. Behold my needs which I know not myself; see and do according to Thy tender mercy. Smite, or heal; depress me, or raise me up; I adore all Thy purposes without knowing them; I am silent; I offer myself in sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish Thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.

- Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-FŽnelon

 

“It is not possible to make a foundation in Yoga if the mind is restless. The first thing needed is quiet in the mind. Also to merge the personal consciousness is not the first aim of the Yoga; the first aim is to open to a higher spiritual consciousness and for this also a quiet mind is the first need.


The first thing to do in the Sadhana is to get a settled peace and silence in the mind. Otherwise you may have experiences, but nothing will be permanent. It is in the silent mind that the true consciousness can be built.
A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface and you will feel your true being within separate from them, observing but not carried away, able to watch and judge them and reject all that has to be rejected and to accept and keep to all that is true consciousness and true experience.
Passivity of the mind is good, but take care to be passive only to the Truth and to the touch of the Divine Shakti. If you are passive to the suggestions and influences of the lower nature, you will not be able to progress or else you will expose yourself to adverse forces which may take you far away from the true path of Yoga.
Aspire to the Mother for this settled quietness and calm of the mind and this constant sense of the inner being in you standing back from the external nature and turned to the Light and Truth.
The forces that stand in the way of sadhana are the forces of the lower mental, vital and physical nature. Behind them are adverse powers of the mental, vital and subtle physical worlds. These can be dealt with only after the mind and heart have become one-pointed and concentrated in the single aspiration to the Divine.”


Sri Aurobindo in 'Bases of Yoga'.

 

If one clings to his attachments, refusing to let go,
Sorrows will not let go their grip on him.

Those who renounce totally reach the highest peak;
The rest remain ensnared in delusion's net.

-Tirukkural 35:347-348

 

"When a spiritual guest enters the house,
Like a bright flame, he must be received well,
With water to wash his feet. Far from wise
Are those who are not hospitable
To such a guest. They will lose all their hopes,
The religious merit they have acquired,
Their sons and their cattle."

-Katha Upanishad

 

"Whatever the appearance we must bear,
Whatever our strong ills and present fate,
When nothing we can see but drift and bale,
A mighty Guidance leads us still through all.
After we have served this great divided world
God's bliss and oneness are our inborn right."

- Sri Aurobindo

 

Go Farther.

Always man takes upon his shoulders an interminable burden. He does not want to drop anything of the past and he stoops more and more under the weight of a useless accumulation.
You have a guide for a part of the way but when you have travelled this part leave the road and the guide and go farther! This is something men find difficult to do. When they get hold of something which helps them, they cling to it, they do not want to move anymore. Those who have progressed with the help of Christianity do not want to give it up and carry it on their shoulders; those who have progressed with the help of Buddhism do not want to leave it and they carry it on their shoulders, and so this hampers the advance and you are indefinitely delayed.
Once you have passed the stage, let it drop, let it go! Go farther.

Get Rid of All Ties.

If your aim is to be free, in the freedom of the spirit, you must get rid of all the ties that are not the inner truth of your being, but come from sub-conscious habits. If you wish to consecrate yourself entirely, absolutely and exclusively to the Divine, you must do it in all completeness; you must not leave bits of yourself tied here and there...
When you come to the Yoga, you must be ready to have all your mental buildings and all your vital scaffoldings shattered to pieces. You must be prepeared to be suspended in the air with nothing to support you except your faith. You will have to forget your past self and its clingings altogether, to pluck it out of your consciosness and be born anew, free from every kind of bondage. Think not of what you were, but what you aspire to be; be altogether in what you want to realize. Turn from your dead past and look straight towards the future. Your religion, country, family lie there; it is the DIVINE.

Sweet Mother.

 

"Think not of what you were, but what you aspire to be; be altogether in what you want to realize. "

Don't lose what you are, for your aspirations are part of you.

 

This is a very personal quote for me today...thank you for posting it.

 

Thank God for guiding our thoughts.

 

"This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul." ~Walt Whitman

 

The intellect's function is to reason from the perceptions of the mind and senses, to form conclusions and to put things in logical relation with each other. A well-trained intellect is a good preparation of the mind for greater knowledge, but it cannot itself give the yogic knowledge or know the Divine - it can only have ideas about the Divine, but having ideas is not knowledge. In the course of the sadhana intellect has to be transformed into the higher mind which is itself a passage towards the true knowledge.

*****

There is no reason why one should not receive through the thinking mind, as one receives through the vital, the emotional and the body. The thinking mind is as capable of receiving as these are, and, since it has to be transformed as well as the rest, it must be trained to receive, otherwise no transformation of it could take place.

It is the ordinary unenlightened activity of the intellect that is an obstacle to spiritual experience, just as the ordinary unregenerated activity of the vital or the obscure stupidly obstructive consciousness of the body is an obstacle. What the sadhak has to be specially warned against in the wrong processes of the intellect is, first, any mistaking of mental ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of the mere mind which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully touches the human mental plane. There are also of course the usual vices of the intellect, - its leaning towards sterile doubt instead of luminous reception and calm enlightened discrimination; its arrogance claiming to judge things that are beyond it, unknown to it, too deep for it by standards drawn from its own limited experience; its attempts to explain the supraphysical by the physical or its demand for the proof of higher and occult things by the criteria proper to Matter and mind in Matter; others also too many to enumerate here.

Always it is substituting its own representations and constructions and opinions for the true knowledge. But if the intellect is surrendered, open, quiet, receptive, there is no reason why it should not be a means of reception of the Light or an aid to the experience of spiritual states and to the fullness of an inner change.




Sri Aurobindo.

 

Prayer for All of Humanity

I pray for all of humanity to one day feel the pulse of the Mother Earth in their feet as they tread. I pray for mankind to find the faith to believe in the messages carried by their dreams and to see beyond the visible world. I pray that everyone I come in contact with can walk away with much, or at least some, of the happiness that lives within me. I pray for peace, acceptance, and tolerance for all who express their love for the higher power (whatever that name may be). Most of all, I pray for an end to the violence and depravity that darkens many souls. Peace be with us all!

- Beliefnet member LadyLovelyBug

 

I want happy.

 

Bhagavad Gita ch15 vs 5.


To be free from the bewilderment of this lower Maya, without egoism, the great fault of attachment conquered, all desires stilled, the duality of joy and grief cast away, always to be fixed in a pure spiritual consciousness, these are the steps of the way to that Supreme Infinite.

Ch.2 vs 14 - 15.

The material touches, giving cold and heat, pleasure and pain, things transient which come and go, these learn to endure, Oh Bharata.

The man whom these do not trouble or pain, the firm and the wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.