“That voice is round me like a bursting sea:

‘And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!…

All which I took from thee I did but take,

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.

All which thy child’s mistake

Fancied as lost, I have stored for thee at home.

Rise, clasp My hand, and come! “

– Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”

Sometimes we think that life is unfair.  We may start to believe that bad things happen to us for no reason.  Sometimes we complain that we aren’t getting what we want. We think these things because we have forgotten what we already have.  It resides in every single one of us.  It is more powerful than money or any materialistic good.  It is stronger than any relationship or any bond.  This one Thing that we have always had and will always have gives us true happiness, abundance, and joy.  It’s force is great and It’s energy is endless.  It’s God.  We just have to try to remember everyday.

 

for thou fliest Me!

“Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible. The good and evil of maya must ever alternate in supremacy. If joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever desire another? Without suffering, he scarcely cares to recall that he has forsaken his eternal home. Pain is a prod to remembrance. The way of escape is through wisdom. The tragedy of death is unreal; those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor who dies of fright on the stage when nothing more has been fired at him than a blank cartridge. My sons are children of light; they will not sleep forever in delusion.”

– The Divine Voice that came to Paramahansa Yogananda

 

if joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever desire another?

words come out from the depths of truth

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by

narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the

dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever widening

thought and action;

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country

awake!”

– Rabindranath Tagore

it is not because they are understood, it is because they are familiar

PROFOUND

“Very strange, very wonderful, seemingly very improbable phenomena may yet appear which, when once established, will not astonish us more than we are now astonished at all that science has taught us during the last century,” Charles Robert Richet, Nobel laureate in physiology, has declared.  “It is assumed that the phenomena which we now accept without surprise do not excite our astonishment because they are understood.  But this is not the case.  If they do not surprise us, it is not because they are understood, it is because they are familiar; for if that which is not understood ought to surprise us, we should be surprised at everything – the fall of a stone thrown into the air, the acorn which becomes an oak, mercury which expands when it is heated, iron attracted by a magnet.

“The science of today is a light matter… Those amazing truths that our descendants will discover are even now all around us, staring us in the eyes, so to speak, and yet we do not see them; we do not wish to see them – for as soon as an unexpected and unfamiliar fact appears, we try to fit it into the framework of the commonplaces of accepted knowledge, and are indignant that anyone should dare to experiment further.”

Statement by Charles Robert Richet found in Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, The Autobiography of a Yogi

“Some people try to be tall by cutting off the heads of others!”

– Sri Yukteswar

We can all relate to this quote given by Paramahansa Yogananda’s guru, Sri Yukteswar. Throughout our lives we come across people who are constantly bringing down others in order to make themselves feel better.  We see this in schools across the world when bullies attack their prey, we see this in the workplace where co-workers find it necessary to criticize each other in order to get ahead, and we see this in our everyday lives on the street while in the car or even in the grocery store.  What people don’t seem to realize is if we can all support each other we will all grow in a way we never thought possible.  If we as humans can lift each other up in every aspect of our lives we will gain understanding and peace.  Bringing down others will only bring down ourselves and in the end more people will be hurt than healed.  Let’s all begin to cut back on the snood remarks and criticism we feel is necessary to give.  Starting today, let’s try to become more peaceful beings so our world can live in a more harmonious way!

some people try to be tall

“Good and evil is the challenging riddle which life places sphinxlike before very intelligence.”

From The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

the challenging riddle