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Yoga and the Quest for the True Self QUOTES

Yoga and the Quest for the True Self QUOTES

1 " I understood that the attachment to myself and my image ... was actually taking me away from my self, away from this wonderful opportunity to just sit, just breathe, just feel the warm animal of my body, just feel the soft, sultry heat of June. The density of my attachment was making it impossible for me to have a truly satisfying experience of life in my body just as it was in the moment. When under the sway of this obsession, my mind's attention was always in the fantasized future, or the idealized or devalued past - never present to the reality of the moment. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

2 " To some extent, most of us are unconsciously driven by our ego-ideal. The ego-ideal is simply a set of ideas in the mind about how we should show up, how we should look, feel, behave, think. This collection of ideas and mental images is created out of fragments of highly charged experiences with important love objects in our lives, and out of the messages we receive in our interactions with the world as we grow. It remains mostly out of our awareness. The blueprint for the ego-ideal is first laid down by parental injunctions about how to be, or how not to be. These highly charged messages are taken in whole. They become the foundation of our scripts for life. The ego-ideal is certainly capable of modification and change, but for most of us it's deeply hardwired into our unconscious by the time we enter early adulthood, and it matures only marginally in later life. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

3 " The goal of human life," says Ramakrishna, "is to meet God face to face." But the magic is this: if we look deeply into the face of all created things, we will find God. Therefore, savor the world, the body. Open it, explore it, look into it. Worship it. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

4 " The feminine comes to us in nature. Go outside. Look at the amazing waves of green, of lilacs, of blue mountains. We are in the presence of the manifestation right here. And she's reaching for you. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

5 " Many of us ordinary folk have tasted these moments of "union" - on the ladder, in the pond, in the jungle, on the hospital bed. In the yogic view, it is in these moments that we know who we really are. We rest in our true nature and know beyond a doubt that everything is OK, and not just OK, but unutterably well. We know that there is nothing to accept and nothing to reject. Life just is as it is. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

6 " The fundamental experience of human suffering is the experience of alienation from the self, from the source—from God. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

7 " Our true self remains deeply hidden, incognito, submerged beneath a web of mistaken identities. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

8 " And there is that wonderful, haunting voice of the true self that calls to us, that keeps us company as we stride deeper and deeper into the world, determined to save the only soul we really can save. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

9 " Just let go of all the rest of the day, now. Let all of your worries roll off your shoulders; let’s just enjoy being home in the body for the next hour and a half. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

10 " the voices of the “buried life” only reveal themselves with utmost clarity when opened to the consciousness of a loved other. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

11 " In itself, the apparently dualistic nature of our phenomenal world is not a problem. We can live with hot and cold, love and hate, gain a loss, light and shadow, sacred and profane. The problem is that we human beings inevitably tend to choose for one side of the polarity and against the other side, artificially attempting to split life down the middle. "

― , Yoga and the Quest for the True Self