Home > Work > Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart
1 " From a personality point of view, you develop judgment, but from the sou's point of view, you develop appreciation. "
― Ram Dass , Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart
2 " Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one. "
3 " When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is. "
4 " The art of listening comes from a quiet mind and an open heart. "
5 " That’s who we all are on this path, spiritual family and friends. It’s just one big family. We’re all relatives until we realize we’re really all the same and there’s only one of us—one loving awareness. May you be one in that love. "
6 " The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside yourself. Rather, you are penetrating the layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being. "
7 " to him, to Krishna, to God. To use your daily life and work as a conscious spiritual path means relinquishing your attachment to the fruits of the actions, to how they come out. Instead of doing it for a reward or a result, you do your work as an offering, out of love for God. Through love for God, your work becomes an expression of devotion, "
8 " That Bhagavad Gita instruction to be unattached to the fruits of your actions is the key. If you are a parent raising a child, don’t get attached to the act of raising the child. That doesn’t mean you’re not a loving, active parent. Your job is to love and nurture, feed and clothe, take care and guard the safety of the child, and guide him or her with your moral compass. But how the child turns out is how the child turns out. Ultimately he or she is not your child; who they turn out to be is up to God and their own karma. Your "
9 " you see it.” Gurdjieff, a great spiritual teacher who taught in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, noted that if you think you’re free and you don’t know you are in prison, you can’t escape. Gurdjieff saw us as being in a prison of our own habits of mind. Unless we understand how we are conditioned by our desires, we remain stuck in the reality they create, like a television program with an ad that keeps repeating over and over, implanting a subliminal message while we watch the show. BEYOND THOUGHT In the West we get rewarded for rational knowledge and learning. But only when you see that the assumptions you’ve been working under are not valid, "
10 " Instead of filling your mind with the daily news, fill it with stuff that helps you become more conscious, that liberates you. As you become more aware of what gets you to God and what doesn’t, you will naturally let go of what doesn’t. That’s purification. You do it to get to God, not for the sake of being pure. "
11 " The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me. "
12 " you are ever again the wave sweeping through all things RAINER MARIA RILKE, BOOK OF HOURS "
13 " Inevitably is an excellent word—inevitably means you’re on a train, and the train is going one way, and you’re at the front of the train running as fast as you can toward the back of the train, in the opposite direction from where the train is headed. But it doesn’t matter, because when the train gets to the station, you get there too. That’s inevitably. That’s my life. "
14 " When you experience fear or are unsure about your situation, there’s a beautiful and very powerful mantra you can say: “The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me.” Repeat it to yourself or to a loved one in need. It will protect you. Experience the power of it. It’s like a solid steel shaft that goes through the top of your head right down to the base of your being. Grace will surround you like a force field. "
15 " In The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, Thaddeus Golas says, “You never have to change what you see, only the way you see it. "
16 " Part of the process of awakening is recognizing that the realities we thought were absolute are only relative. All you have to do is shift from one reality to another once, and your attachment to what you thought was real starts to collapse. Once the seed of awakening sprouts in you, there’s no choice—there’s no turning back. "
17 " Each of us has our own unique karmic predicament, our own unique work to do. The predicament is that there is nowhere to stand, because our identification with the person who has the karma is changing too. As you develop the witness and identify more with your spiritual heart, karma just is. "
18 " Aldous Huxley reminds us, “The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man’s being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit. "
19 " The art of spiritual growth has to do with how quickly you recognize attachments and how quickly you can release them. "
20 " Satsang "
