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Thought for the Day for August
by Swami Krishnananda

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Months

  1. The love of the Self is the basis of all other loves. One loves another, because one loves the Self the most. The ultimate purpose of all loves is to rest in the satisfaction of one's own Self.
  2. To be spiritual is to be true to our own nature, not to be self-deceptive—to be true to our conscience, and to exhibit in our outer conduct what we are internally in our own selves.
  3. There should not be any mistake in the choice of the object of meditation. If the object is properly chosen, the mind will spontaneously come under control.
  4. When you are absolutely alone in the solitude of your own room, if your happiness is the most intense, that would perhaps indicate your progress along the spiritual path, your inner growth.
  5. When you chant Om, do not think that you are making a sound through your mouth. It is your original source rising to the surface of your personality. We do not create the vibration; the vibration creates us.
  6. Meditation is a merging, an immersion in the total absorption of oneself in that which is inundating us from all sides. It is like the drop contemplating the ocean of which it is a part.
  7. Spiritual knowledge is indivisible experience, not divisible like intellectual knowledge.  It is intuition which does not function on the basis of duality, but is essentially a self-identical, integral experience.
  8. Though a teacher can point out the way, the actual spiritual life has to be lived by one's own self, for knowledge or direct experience of Reality is the only way to liberation.
  9. The world is to be contemplated upon as a kingdom seen in a dream. It is a reality at the time of its experience but vanishes instantaneously on one's rising to wakefulness.
  10. The effect of one's reading and learning can be seen in one's behaviour. If the behaviour has not changed, it means the learning acquired is like water poured over a rock.
  11. All goodness is a force that is struck between two extremes. When you go to extremes, even goodness becomes badness.
  12. As the individual is in the universal, the environment should not stand outside you. You have to be in union with that atmosphere.
  13. If you consider anything as outside you, it shall run away from you because it is ashamed to feel that you consider it as outside you and then want it.
  14. The difficulty arising out of the cognition of another is because of the fact that the basic Reality, that Unchanging Eternity, has no 'another' outside it.
  15. The sense of perfection slowly enters the mind when it gradually learns to dovetail the various discrepant particulars of the world into a coherent whole.
  16. “The world is in a state of yoga,” says the Upanishad. This single statement may be regarded as the essence of all higher teachings.
  17. The whole cosmos is nothing but a balance of forces. We may say it is a big electromagnetic field which tries to maintain itself always and will not brook any intervention from others.
  18. All the procedures of meditation are, in the end, ways of awakening the Soul-consciousness which, in its depth, is, at once, God-consciousness. In brief, meditation is the art of uniting with Reality.
  19. It is a psychological secret that if you strictly believe that what you want has come, it should come and it has to come, because your resolution touches the object that you need and it gravitates towards you immediately.
  20. Our quality of meditation is nothing but the quality of our personality manifesting itself. Whatever we are is projected in meditation, and so the flickering mind in meditation is indicative of a distracted and torn personality not yet ready for meditation.
  21. The proper attitude for us to understand the world is that we should neither have the idea that the world is a friend, nor have the idea that the world is an enemy.
  22. We should not try to be more strict on others than we are on ourselves. Our task is not so much to change the world as to change ourselves.
  23. To some extent we may say that the psychic impressions formed in perception of objects become a substance, as it were, so powerful as to produce this physical body of ours, obstructing all our progress in the right direction.
  24. Invisible things control visible objects. The visible world is not the real. The real is that which cannot be seen. The invisible is the real. The more invisible and subtle the thing becomes, the more real it also is.
  25. The Guru is not a person, he is not a man or woman; he is a principle which represents a power behind and beyond the visible framework which you call the body of the Guru.
  26. The spirit of religious worship and meditation has to saturate and seep into secular life, if life is to become a healthy whole. The apparently secular life has to become a living step to the more organised dimension of religious experience.
  27. What we call the spiritual way of living is the way of God, the way of the Absolute, the way of the Tao, as they call it. Though we might have not achieved it, contacted it, or understand it fully, we should be sure of moving in that direction.
  28. A philosophical insight is an awakening of a new light from within, with whose aid one can illumine the dark corners of the earth and endeavour to see things in their true colours, rather than be carried away by their chamaeleon-like shapes and presentations.
  29. The evolutionary process of the cosmos is the movement of all phenomena towards Self-realisation, not of any given individual, but of all things uniformly. It is the Self-realisation of the universe.
  30. Great men are not those who run fast and speak much but think deep and live wisely. More than doing, it is being something—a change of outlook and attitude.
  31. All the joys of this world, of all the creation put together, are said to be one drop of this Universal Brahman Bliss, the Bliss of the Absolute.