Thank you for being a ThinkSmarterWorld.com reader in 2017. What follows are some of my favorite quotes from the past year. I hope you enjoy and benefit from them as much as I have.
Wishing a Happy New Year to you and your family. Here’s hoping 2018 brings us much closer to a peaceful and joyful world where thinking and acting with Moral Clarity and Spiritual Integrity are the norm for all people in every aspect of their lives.
-Jay
Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
“To create Peace in the World, You must be Unruffled within. Become Tranquil, Walk in Stillness, and Act in Harmony. The Serenity that Radiates from You will Create Peace.”
~Daniel LevinThe True Nature of Reality is Within You …“Inside me there was everything I had believed was outside. There was, in particular, the sun, light, and all colors. There were even the shapes of objects and the distance between objects. Everything was there and movement as well… Light is an element that we carry inside us and which can grow there with as much abundance, variety, and intensity as it can outside of us… God is there under a form that has the good luck to be neither religious, not intellectual, nor sentimental, but quite simply alive.” ― Jacques Lusseyran
We are all consumers of Energetic Vibration and Information … Choose carefully…“I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson. Update to the 21st century … “ I cannot remember the books, movies, television programs, music, magazines, blog posts, social media, news programs, podcasts, and speech of others that I have consumed; even so, they have made me. From moment to moment they acutely affect my thoughts and emotions and therefore determine the energetic vibration I exist at. When I am vigilant and thoughtful, I don’t allow negative words, imagery, and sound to enter my being. The result when I do this is a connection to divine consciousness which provides a harmonious life full of beauty, love, joy, and perfect health.”
The Challenge of Effective Communication – “Listening is the means by which we understand the messages that are verbally given to us. Listening is more than just hearing; hearing is the process of the ears receiving sound whereas listening is the process of the brain attaching meaning to the sound.” ~Dee Apolline …and there lies the rub – one person’s meaning which is based on their particular world-view, experiences, and biases is different from every other person. A group of people can listen intently and actively to the exact same speech or discussion and come away with significantly different understanding of what was said or intended by the speaker. Therefore, striving to understand each other’s ‘meaning’ and exploring our own and other’s assumptions and biases is one way to close the communication gap.
“If we don’t question what seems wrong, we’ll never understand what is right.” ~Paul McGowan
“All of us are born mystics,” writer Ann Gordon tells us, “for the capacity to experience wonder and a primal sense of connectedness with all life is our birthright.” And what mystics have always known has been confirmed by physics and ecology – all things are interconnected. What happens in one place affects all places.We are finally settling into a period when the dueling dualisms of the past are giving way to holistic thinking. The separations between mind and body, human nature and the natural world, are being scrapped for a new project – the reenchantment of the world. We are learning what Christian theologian Richard Niebuhr knows: “Passage into larger, more encompassing life takes place in our acts of connecting with living beings whom we, in our casual unmindfulness, treat as separate from ourselves.” ~Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat from their book, Spiritual Literacy
“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” ~Buddha
“Entering into harmonic relationships is the goal not only of music. It is the goal of atoms and molecules, of planetary orbits, of cells and hearts, of brain waves and movements, of flocks of birds and schools of fish and – in principle – of human beings. All of them (or better: the cosmos, the entire creation) have harmony as their final goal.” ~ Joachim-Ernst Berendt, writing in The World is Sound
Our Perception Creates Our Reality: “Quantum Mechanics teaches us that reality is altered as it’s being observed. We change what we see as we are looking at it. Hence, the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us influences not only our subjective experience of reality – but also reality itself. This is the biggest unknown in the equation of Seeing and Perceiving Truth. The ultimate challenge in wanting to pierce through outer illusions is that we have to be willing to decode our inner illusions first. The way we perceive things determines our reference point in time and space, how we feel and what we sense, and thus creates an energy field that interacts with whatever outer energy we are observing. In other words – how we experience reality – or Truth for that matter – depends on our general energetic alignment and temporary state.” ~jona bryndis
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ~Søren Kierkegaard
“We must know how to alternately use the faculties of the intellect and the heart, in other words, to balance the cold current, which circulates in the region of wisdom, with the warm current of love. Truth lies within this balance. If love is not tempered by wisdom, it leads to sentimentality, carelessness, sensuality; but wisdom by itself leads to coldness, contempt and cruelty. Therefore the cold of wisdom must temper the warmth of love, and the warmth of love must moderate the cold of wisdom. Truth – which is life – will find the best conditions in this temperate climate. If the grain of wheat is to grow normally, it needs just enough warmth and not too much cold either. There is an ideal temperature for all seeds, and why not also for those seeds called human beings? Why would we be an exception?” ~Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
“If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental or spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is truth and the freedom from the false.”~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” ~Antisthenes
“Chaos is necessary for a system to restructure and rebuild itself on a higher level.” ~Vera Ingeborg
“The great and fatal pitfall in the art field and in life is dependence on the intellect rather than inspiration. Dependence on intellect means a consideration of observed facts and deductions from observation as a guide in life. Dependence on inspiration means dependence on consciousness, a growing consciousness that develops from awareness of beauty and happiness.To live and work by inspiration you have to stop thinking.You have to hold your mind still in order to hear inspiration clearly.” ~Artist Agnes Martin
FEAR – False Evidence Appearing as Real – When we focus on what we dread, we give power to false evidence and make it reality. To an Earthkeeper, love is not a feeling ─ nor is it something you barter with. Love is the essence of who you are, and it radiates from you as a brilliant aura: You become love, practice fearlessness, and attain enlightenment.” ~ A. Villoldo [Fear is Truly the Enemy …]
“One answer to ‘why?’ is that we let this suffering happen because for the most part we cannot avoid it. The Earth World is designed specifically to give us seasons of great resistance and challenge. It is trying to knock us out of the pride of our mind’s knowledge of form and matter, logic and reason, and beyond our outer illusion into the silent wisdom of the heart. I have seen it said often that the longest distance in the spiritual search is the fourteen inches from head to heart.” ~Carla Rueckert
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”- Rumi
We Create our Physical Reality through Our Minds – Mind is Cause, Reality is an Effect: “When man solves the mystery of imagining, he will have discovered the secret of causation, and that is: Imagining creates reality. Therefore, the man who is aware of what he is imagining knows what he is creating; realizes more and more that the drama of life is imaginal – not physical. All activity is at bottom imaginal. An awakened Imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable.” ~ from The Law and The Promise by Neville Goddard
“Meditation in the better sense is the bending of the Consciousness and the raising of the Mind to the plane where Intuition guides and where some noble idea or aspiration is native, and the holding of the consciousness in Thought there.” – G. de Purucker
Raising Your Consciousness and Reclaiming Your Inherent Divine Power: “Regaining spiritual consciousness is not tearing one house down and building another. It is more like moving out of the basement and into the main floor. Remember that you are an individualized Energy Field. Within this force field are lower and higher vibrations. Your ‘I’ of identity is like the mercury in a thermometer, rising and falling according to the weather of your thoughts and emotions. For the majority of people, the ‘I’ remains the cold, dark atmosphere of the lower mind, while all the time in the upper region of the energy field, the Sun is shining and there is the warmth of Light, Love, and Joy. Here, the Energy is pure, the vibrations high, and the Consciousness illumined.” ~ John Randolph Price from his book, The Planetary Commission
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love …What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” ~ Martin Luther King
“When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you? The two are so, so different. One is an infinite consciousness capable of being and creating whatever it chooses, the other is an illusion imprisoned by its own perceived and programmed limitations.” ~David Icke
“Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.” ~Ramana Maharshi
