Inspiring quotes from hinduism and other sources

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want;
he makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

Psalm 23

 

"All of them - as they surrender unto Me - I reward accordingly. Everyone follows My path in all respects, O son of Partha."


Bhagavad Gita ch.4 vs.11.

 

Rock band. Sang a song with the lyrics

I'll click and look, thank you.

 

It strikes me that St. Simeon had a remarkable view of it all - esp. given the period and culture in which he lived. Interesting that he was a thousand years prior to Faith no More... makes you wonder about notions of so called progress....

Anyway, here's another quote:


...it is in God alone, by the posession of the Divine only that all the dichords of life can be resolved, and therefore, the raising of men toward the Divine is, in the end, the one effective way of helping mankind.

Sri Aurobindo.

 

God is the only one who is not divine.

 

In the city of Brahman is a secret dwelling,
the lotus of the heart. Within this dwelling is a
space, and within that space is the fulfillment
of our desires. What is within that space
should be longed for and realized.

-Chandogya Upanishad

 

What is stupidity? It is that vanity
Which dares to declare, "I am wise."

He who pretends to knowledge that he does not possess
Raises doubts as to those things that he really knows.

-Tirukkural 85: 844-845

 

Like a silkworm weaving
her house with love
from her marrow,
and dying
in her body's threads
winding tight, round
and round,
I burn
desiring what the heart desires.

-Mahadeviyakka

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How Great Is Your Goodness


How great is your goodness, dear Lord!
Blessed are you for ever!
May all created things praise you, O God,
for loving us so much that we can truthfully speak
of your fellowship with mankind, even in this earthly exile;
and however virtuous we may be,
our virtue always depends on your great warmth
and generosity, dear Lord.
Your bounty is infinite.
How wonderful are your works!


- St. Teresa of Avila

 

Oh God,
You are peace.
From you comes peace,
To you returns peace.
Revive us with a salutation of peace,
And lead us to your abode of peace.


- Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)

 

The Atman is the witness-consciousness that experiences the action, the actor, and the world of separate things. It is like a light that illuminates everything in a theater, revealing the master of ceremonies, the guests, and the dancers with complete impartiality. Even when they all depart, the light shines to reveal their absence.

-Panchadashi

 

"We do not see the way that lies ahead of us. It seems dark, but God is the master of all destinies and His will is love. Let us then put aside everything else and trust ourselves completely to Him, giving ourselves to His love, asking Him to enlighten and guide us in the way of positive action, if any such be feasible. For the rest, we must have great patience and sustained fidelity to His will and to our ideals."



Thomas Merton.

 

"Love, fear, prayer, praise, worship of an impersonality which has no relation with us or with anything in the universe and no feature that our minds can lay hold of, are obviously an irrational foolishness. On such terms religion and devotion become out of the question.

The Advaitin, in order to find a religious basis for his bare and sterile philosophy, has to admit the practical existence of God and the gods and to delude his mind with the language of maya. Buddhism only became a popular religion when Buddha had taken the place of the Supreme Deuty as an object of worship."

Sri Aurobindo in 'The Synthesis of Yoga'

 

Bill, that states a strong case for Bhakti, whether it be of Vaisnava, Christian, Muslim, or whatever other variety.

 

Absolutely. It's quoted from the section of Synthesis of Yoga entitled 'The Yoga of Divine Love'.
Sri Aurobindo says in this work, that the three Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita can be synthesized or combined in what he calls an Integral Yoga, Comprising elements of Bhakti, Jnana, and Karma Yogas (Love, Knowlege, Works). But there is no doubt that Bhakti is central to Sri Aurobindo's yoga.
He is criticizing 'the Advaitin' here in the sense of the strict Advaitin, for whom all forms of God must simply be relegated to part of the cosmic illusion. (in practice many who call themselves Advaitins do also practice some form of Bhakti).
He doesn't deny that there is a genuine experience behind both advaita and Buddhism, but says it is only a partial experience. The world for Sri A( including higher worlds) is not an illusion, but a manifestation of the Divine - even if it is still an imperfect manifestation.

The full text of 'The Yoga of Divine Love' can be found here - my quote is from ch.2.

http://intyoga.online.fr/bhakti.htm

 

The advaitin or atheistic spiritual model lacks opposing qualities that are essentially greater and lesser, dominant and subordinate, and the tension that results from that opposition. The dynamic of free will can't truly exist in the advaitin spiritual situation, because in that the omnipotent only opposes itself, in contrast to the opposition of the almighty and the limited in dvaitin or theistic spiritual models.


Back to Srila Prabhupada's classic challenge: "If you are God, why are you in illusion in the first place?"...there have been some very eloquent answers put forth here in the Hinduism forum in the past but none of them have resolved the question.

 

But isn't it true that vishista advaita says that at one level , you are part of God, part of whole, its not this idea that you are completely seperate from God. Madvacharya and Shankaracharya I think only give half of the picture.

 

Right or wrong,
Joy and sorrow,
These are of the mind only.
They are not yours.

It is not really you
Who acts or enjoys.

You are everywhere,
Forever free.

-Ashtavakra Gita 1:6

 

I don't think any aspect of either advaita or dvaita philosophy claims that individuals are ever spiritually unconnected to God; the question is the process of how we came to be in the position of forgetfulness of that connection.

 

"Religion and the Yoga of Bhakti .......attribute to this Being(the absolute, God) a Personality and human relations with the human being. In both the human being approaches the Divine by means of his humanity, with human emotions, as he would approach a fellow-being, but with more intense and exalted feelings; and not only so, but the Divine also responds in a manner answering to these emotions. In that possibility of response lies the whole question; for if the Divine is impersonal, featureless and relationless, no such response is possible and all human approach to it becomes an absurdity; we must rather dehumanise, depersonalise, annul ourselves in so far as we are human beings or any kind of beings; on no other conditions and by no other means can we approach it." - Sri Aurobindo - 'The Yoga of Divine Love'.

I think the key word here is 'relationless'. For a strict advaita there can clearly be no relation between the Divine and the individual because the Brahman is the 'One Reality' - all else, including the individual is illusion.To realize it would entail anullment of the individual being, and the experience of the individual in the cosmos.
Sri Aurobindo doesn't deny the experience of advaita - he says it is a limited realization which doesn't see the personal or immanent aspects of the Divine. For Sri Aurobindo, the cosmos and the individual are expressions, manifestations of the Divine, not an illusion.

To complicate it even further, sometimes Sri Aurobindo's system has been called 'Integral Advaita'. In brief, this has to be understood as seeing both the Oneness and the multiplicity as Divine in a higher consciousness.

 

Another quote from the same work:


"The way of Bhakti is supposed often to be necessarily inferior because it proceeds by worship which belongs to that stage of spiritual experience where there is a difference, an insufficient unity between the human soul and the Divine, because its very principle is love and love means always two, the lover and the beloved, a dualism therefore, while oneness is the highest spiritual experience, and because it seeks after the personal God while the Impersonal is the highest and the eternal truth, if not even the sole Reality. But worship is only the first step on the path of devotion. Where external worship changes into the inner adoration, real Bhakti begins; that deepens into the intensity of divine love; that love leads to the joy of closeness in our relations with the Divine; the joy of closeness passes into the bliss of union. Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness, by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment. This is the weakness of the mind that it limits itself by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against the other."


"If to thought the Impersonal seems the wider and higher truth, the Personal a narrower experience, the spirit finds both of them to be aspects of a Reality which figures itself in both, and if there is a knowledge of that Reality to which thought arrives by insistence on the infinite Impersonality, there is also a knowledge of it to which love arrives by insistence on the infinite Personality. The spiritual experience of each leads, if followed to the end, to the same ultimate Truth. By Bhakti as by knowledge, as the Gita tells us, we arrive at unity with the Purushottama, the Supreme who contains in himself the impersonal and numberless personalities, the qualityless and infinite qualities, pure being, consciousness and delight and the endless play of their relations."
Sri Aurobindo.