Year 2000 Archives
Here we archive
"Here's A Thought" items from the year 2000.
To return to the current year, click here.
Addional years' archives are also accessible from the
same page.
December 30, 2000
What is divine in Man is elusive and impalpable, and he [she] is easily tempted to embody it in a collective form -- a church, a country, a social system, a leader -- so that he [she] may realize it with less effort and serve it with more profit. Yet the attempt to externalize the kingdom of heaven in a temporal shape must end in disaster. It cannot be created by charters or constitutions, nor established by arms. Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.
Hugh Kingsmill
Quoted in Jesus Rediscovered
by Malcolm Muggeridge
December 25, 2000
Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
December 16, 2000
All of your body is in your mind, but not all of your mind is in your body.
Jack Schwarz
http://www.holisticu.org
December 10, 2000
Through my short span of the unending days
Let me be one of His mysterious ways.
Noel Hudson Stearn
"Application For Secret Service"
The Bookfellow Poetry Annual 1944
December 3, 2000
God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
Robert Browning
Paracelsus, ii
November 26, 2000
Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.
November 20, 2000
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for), but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Oenone
November 13, 2000
Self of my Self, for Thou art but I,
Self of my Self, for I am but Thou,
Twain of us in one shall never die,
What do they matter -- the why and how?
Lalleswari
(sometimes, Lalla Yogiswari, Lal Diddi, Lal Ded)
Kashmiri Mystic (14th Century)
Quoted in Women Saints
- East and West
November 4, 2000
Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit card ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are?
Sogyal Rinpoche
The
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be so beautiful, talented, gorgeous, fabulous?" Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. This is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
in A
Return to Love
[See also here]
October 22, 2000
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
John Dryden
October 15, 2000
From silly devotions
and from sour-faced saints,
good Lord, deliver us.
Saint Teresa of
Avila
In Martyrs & Miracles
October 8, 2000
Both what you run away from
-- and what you yearn for --
is within YOU.
October 1, 2000
I want to help others.
Who is there for you to help? Who is the "I" that is going to help
others? First clear up that point, and then everything will settle itself.
Sri Ramana Maharshi
The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi
September 24, 2000
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon
September 17, 2000
Religion is a river, not a monument.
Diana Eck
Professor at Harvard
Author of Encountering
God
September 9, 2000
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt
[Attributed, on the web. We do
not know the precise source.]
September 3, 2000
The light of the sun is seen in its full brilliance only when the clouds are totally removed. Likewise, the true glory of the Self is perceived only when the mind remains free from all tendencies created by its good as well as its evil actions.
Swami Nikhilananda
Introduction to The Bhagavad Gita
This onward movement of the ego from the seat of the Kundalini to the lotus of myriad petals has been found to be of five kinds, like that of an ant, a fish, a snake, a frog, or a monkey, according to the intensity of its desire to realize the goal. … This is the usual method of realizing highest Truth. But the soul, being really infinite, cannot have any motion; for how can infinity go from one place to another, it having no outside and so nowhere to go? Hence, whenever motion is ascribed to the Infinite Being, we do it out of our ignorance of Its true nature. But a jnani, who has been able to understand clearly his [her] infinite nature intellectually, from whom all desires have fallen off and who has thus been left pure and single, does not need to go from one place to another, from a lower to a higher center. He [she] knows that his [her] true home is the heart where he [she] unceasingly resides in the three conditions of waking, dream, and sleep, whether he [she] knows it or not. In the heart alone the Unmanifested Being of infinite power manifests Itself as soul and ego, both of which never go out of it really, although they imagine them to be outside it.
Saint Seraphim of Sarov
The
Spiritual Instructions of Saint Seraphim
Note: A jnani is a practitioner of jnana yoga, the path of discernment. See also here. Return to text.
August 21, 2000
As long as the bee is outside the lotus, so long will it have to fly round and round and buzz, but once it gets into the flower, and tastes the honey there, both its wanderings and buzzings cease. So, as long as man remains outside the lotus of his [her] heart, he [she] has to wander in search of pleasure in vain, but once he [she] goes inside it, and tastes the nectar of Divine communion, all his [her] wanderings cease once and for all.
Sri Ramakrishna,
quoted in
The
Spiritual Instructions of Saint Seraphim
August 14, 2000
People seeking mystical attainment expect it on their own terms, and hence generally exclude themselves from it before they start. Nobody can hope to arrive at illumination if he [she] thinks that he [she] knows what it is, and believes that he [she] can achieve it through a well-defined path which he [she] can conceive at the moment of starting.
Idries Shah
The
Sufis
August 6, 2000
What you can do or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
July 29, 2000
It's amazing stuff. Our neurons fire a few micro-volts of electricity, and we call it thought. At the same time, all of us are constantly bathed in massive waves of electro-magnetic fields ... and for every field, there are millions of harmonics. It makes me tingle just thinking about it!
Merlin
TZF's ISP Administrator
July 22, 2000
I am totally safe in the Universe.
I am at peace everywhere.
I trust life.
Louise L. Hay
Heal
Your Body - The Mental Causes ...
July 11, 2000
It is our duty — as men and women — to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are co-creators of the Universe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1881-1955)
Jesuit priest, theologian, philosopher, paleontologist
July 4, 2000
The supreme experience is staggering, enrapturing, blissful, and inspiring, but at the same time inexplicable and ungraspable by the intellect. The experience is supremely illuminating because it reveals the grandeur, sublimity and the eternal nature of the soul, but beyond that -- what? All that is beyond lies out of the reach of the intellect, and hence cannot be translated into any language devised by the mind.
Gopi Krishna
Living
with Kundalini
June 28, 2000
It is a mistake to assume that God is interested only, or even chiefly, in religion.
Attributed to William Temple
Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-1944)
June 20, 2000
"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he
asked.
"Begin at the beginning" the King said gravely, "and go on till
you come to the end; then stop."
Lewis Carroll
Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland
June 12, 2000
Life, the problem, can be solved by the soul, the solution; but for that, one has first to be awakened from within.
Sri Chinmoy
Commentaries
on the Vedas ...
(AUM, p. 150)
June 5, 2000
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal.
From A Psalm of Life
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
May 30, 2000
We cannot live according to a human standard of life and at the same time reap the fruitage of the spiritual life: We cannot live according to an-eye-for-an-eye and a-tooth-for-a-tooth philosophy, nor depend upon treasures laid up where moth and rust corrupt; we cannot live according to the human code and at the same time pray to God for spiritual light, spiritual bread, spiritual wine, and spiritual water.
Joel S. Goldsmith
The
Thunder of Silence
(HarperCollins, Chapter XI)
May 23, 2000
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
Malcolm Muggeridge
quoted in
Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do
by Peter McWilliams
May 18, 2000
From Dante's Divine Comedy, on the why of creation -
Not to increase His good, which cannot be,
But that His splendour, shining back, might say:
Behold, I am.
Dante Alighieri
The
Divine Comedy - Paradise (29:13)
Trans. Dorothy Sayers & Barbara Reynolds
May 12, 2000
Eternity
He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
From A Grain of Sand
Poems by William Blake
Selected by Rosemary Manning
May 9, 2000
After a trip to Canada, Roy Rogers, the cowboy singer and actor, was asked what he had learned about faith there. Rogers replied, "I reckon the most important thing I learned about faith in Canada was the most important thing I have learned about faith in Hawaii, the British Isles, and all over -- it works!"
The Answer is God
a biography of Roy Rogers & Dale Evans,
by Elise Miller Davis
May 6, 2000
The beginning of Wisdom is this: "I don't know, and I can't find out".
TZF
May 3, 2000
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era
(1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full,
and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer
could restrain himself: "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are
full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you
first empty your cup?"
Zen Flesh,
Zen Bones
by Paul Reps
April 30, 2000
As frightened children look everywhere for the imaginary ghost, so sick humanity sees danger in every direction, and looks for relief in all ways except the right one. Darkness induces fear. The adult, in bondage to his beliefs, no more comprehends his real being than does the child; and the adult must be taken out of his darkness, before he can get rid of the illusive sufferings which throng the gloaming.
Mary Baker Eddy
SCIENCE & HEALTH
Chapter XII
April 28, 2000
No sacrifice is worth the name unless it is a joy. Sacrifice and a long face go ill together.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
April 27, 2000
... he dropped on me something whose logic never would get out of my head. He said, No man has believed perfectly until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.
Malcolm X
speaking of Dr. Mahmoud Youssef Shawarbi
(Director of The Federation of Islamic Associations
in The US & Canada), in
The
Autobiography of Malcolm X
