I just did a workshop on Sunday at Flow Yoga Center (Easter Sunday no less!) called "The Hip & the Holy." It went great and focused on releasing our negative emotions from our hips, and opening our hearts through inspiration from holy teachers throughout the ages. Through the workshop, I quotes many of these sages, mystics, and prophets and wanted to share some of their "vision" here:
Christian mystic Julian of Norwich said, knowing that “all will be well. All matter of things will be well.”
Physicist-turned-metaphysician Peter Russell says, “God is Light. God is said to be absolute—and in physics, so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form, beyond both space and time—so does light. God cannot be known directly—nor (as photons) can light.”
St. John from the New Testament refers to “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”
The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation refers to “the self-originated Clear Light of the Void, eternally unborn, shining forth within one’s own mind.”
The Islamic tradition refers to Light as well; Islamic scholar Abu’l-Hosain al-Nuri experienced light “gleaming in the Unseen. I gazed at it continuously, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.”
Einstein
Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, I am a deeply religious man.
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. 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 primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
Erwin Schrodinger (quantum physicist)
The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, what really matters to us. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.
Rabindranath Tagore (Gurudev)
Man must understand that when he cuts himself off from all stimulating and purifying contact with infinity, and no longer relies on it for his subsistence and his health, he risks madness; he tears himself asunder and divorces himself from his very substance.
Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.
This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.
Theresa of Avila
“Prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”
“Take God for your spouse and friend and walk with Him continually, and you will not sin, will learn to love, and the things you must do will work out prosperously for you.”
“Let nothing disturb you.
let nothing make you afraid.
All things pass
But God is unchangning
Patience
Is enough for everything
You who have God
Lack nothing
God along is sufficient.”
Richard Rohr
All religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally see; we have to be taught how to see.
Jeremiah 29.13-14
“When you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me.”
Meister Eckhardt (medieval Dominican mystic)
“God is closer to me than I am to myself.”
Swami Vivekananda
When you look at that unchanging Existence from the outside, you call it God; and when you look at it from the inside, you call it yourself. It is but one.
The very essence of the Hindu philosophy is that man is a spirit and has a body and not that man is a body and may have a spirit also.
The Hindu believes that is a spirit. He believes that the sword cannot pierce him, that fire cannot burn him, that water cannot dissolve him, that air cannot dry him out. He belives that the soul is a circle whose circumference has no limits but whose center is situated in the body. Death signifies the transference of this center of a body to another. We are the children of God. Matter is our servant.
Oh, if you only knew yourselves! You are souls, you are gods. If ever I felt that I am blaspheming, it is when I call you man.
The whole universe is to us a writing of the Infinite in the language of the finite.
Fr. Pedro Arrupe SJ
“Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in love in a quite absolute final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.”
Krishna Das
"If we know anything about a path at all, it's only because of the Great ones that have gone before us. Out of their love and kindness, they have left some footprints for us to follow. So, in the same way that they wish for us, we wish that all beings everywhere, including ourselves, be safe, be happy, have good health, and enough to eat. And may we all live at ease of heart with whatever comes to us in life."
Richard Rohr
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still
Be
Rabi’a, a major female saint of Islam from the Sufi tradition, 717-800AD
How long will you keep pounding an open door
Begging for someone to open it?
May God steal from you
All that steals you from Him.
