It Makes No Difference to the Sun

This is a nice analogy that speaks to the existence and the ubiquity of God. You’ll find it on page 56 of the book, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

It is like entering a dark room. You see nothing—you may touch, but you do not see—no colors, no outlines. The window opens and the room is flooded with light. Colors and shapes come into being. The window is the giver of light, but not the

The Beautiful Terror of Uncertainty

Anita Moorjani

Anita Moorjani‘s account of her near-death experience (NDE) is one of the most profound stories I have ever encountered—not just because of her astonishing experience beyond this world but because her body healed itself of her end-stage cancer (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) within days of her return to this life. Click here to watch a forty-six-minute video interview with Anita in which she shares the story of her NDE.

I’m currently reading and enjoying Anita’s book, Dying to Be Me. Here are two paragraphs from page 137 that contain a whole lotta wisdom.

Since my NDE, I’ve learned that strongly held ideologies actually work against me. Needing to operate out of concrete beliefs limits my experiences because it keeps me within the realm of only what I know—and my knowledge is limited. And if I restrict myself to

No Striving Required

So many spiritual seekers these days are determined to reach enlightenment. Yet if they continue to strive for it, enlightenment will remain forever out of their reach. Enlightenment is achieved not through striving but through surrender. Enlightenment then becomes a natural consequence of devotion.

Dr. David R. Hawkins summarized this concept beautifully in his book, Dissolving the Ego, Realizing the Self:

Out of an unrestricted

Your Soul Is a Violin

This uplifting poem eloquently conveys the beauty and perfection of each individual soul—as long as you think of your soul as the violin and a God-realized Guru as the Master. True, the casual reader might not recognize the lyric’s spiritual theme, but author Myra Brooks Welch was a deeply spiritual woman, as you can see by her biography below.

THE TOUCH OF THE MASTER’S HAND

‘Twas battered and scarred,
And the auctioneer thought it
hardly worth his while
To waste his time on the old violin,
but he held it up with a smile.

“What am I bid, good people,” he cried,
“Who starts the bidding for me?”
“One dollar, one dollar, Do I hear two?”
“Two dollars, who makes it three?”
“Three dollars once, three dollars twice, going for three . . .”

But, no,
From the room far back a gray-bearded man
Came forward and picked up the bow.
Then wiping the dust from the old violin
And tightening up the strings,
He played a melody, pure and sweet
As sweet as the angel sings.

The music ceased and the auctioneer
With a voice that was quiet and low,
Said, “What now am

The Sun Rises for Everyone

Spirituality encourages direct contact with God, yet without a disciplined commitment to self-awareness, seekers on the road to truth may miss the turn for humility and veer off toward arrogance.

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
Italian proverb

Yes, the further you move down the path of enlightenment, the more distance you create between your

Divine Blessings Ceaselessly Shower Down

Image by Jan Jansen Pascal

The beckoning whisper of Spirit is a call to rise, to be a source of love and light to the world, to humbly be of service to God and mankind. Life begins anew when you joyously acknowledge that everything you do is for God and that everything you have is from God.

By living fully, recognizing that all we do is by His power, we honor God; He in turn blesses us.
Becky Laird

As you transform the way you show up in the world, divine blessings ceaselessly shower down to guide your way.

Every man who becomes heartily and understandingly a channel of the Divine beneficence is

Click Your Ruby Slippers

You will have the power to transform your life the moment you realize that you have always had the power to do so.

All the Buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be—don’t try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance.
Osho

Dorothy could have clicked the heels of her ruby slippers together three times as soon as she arrived in Oz, but she had to

Grandmother and King

Lao Tzu

One of the most gratifying benefits of walking a spiritual path is that you find yourself changing in unexpected and wonderful ways. For instance, the more you consciously practice kindness, compassion and other soul qualities, the more you unconsciously embody these qualities and simply become them. This quote by Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism, perfectly expresses this happy phenomenon:

If you don’t realize the source,
You stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you

Dying at the Right Moment

As you progress on your spiritual path and the ego’s power diminishes, so too does the fear of death, both consciously and unconsciously.

Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl.
Rumi

At the body’s final breath, the God-illumined soul discards its

Walking With God and Wrestling With the Devil

The more you empty yourself of ego and your own self-importance, the more room there is for spirit. But beware: Your ego is programmed for self-preservation. Back your ego into a corner and it can slither out like a seductive snake, shrewdly tempting you back toward the sense pleasures of the material world and away from the soul pleasures of the spiritual path.

A whole person is one who both has walked with God and wrestled with the devil.
Carl Jung

The wise spiritual aspirant discerns the difference between self-destructive pleasures and those earthly delights that inspire our spirit to soar to greater heights of exaltation.

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.
Eric Liddell
Olympic Gold medalist portrayed in the film Chariots of Fire

The ego is the devil on

When Ego Becomes a Servant of the Soul

One challenge in walking a spiritual path is maintaining the right balance of ego and spirit so that spirit is firmly in command, like a parent lovingly guiding a child. Like a child, your ego is motivated by the need for attention, validation, and independence.

There is a point where destiny and chaos walk hand in hand, when ego and soul force become one, when your ego becomes a servant of the soul.
Caroline Myss

Train your ego to cooperate, rather than compete, with spirit, and your ego will feel less of a need to judge, control, and dominate. As long as your ego

Doorway to the Divine

When you identify with ego, with individuality, separateness, and scarcity, you see yourself as naked and vulnerable in an unfriendly world. Transcend your ego, and you discover that behind every perceived separation from spirit is a doorway to the divine.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
Simone Weil

Lose yourself in ego and you unconsciously act selfishly. Lose yourself in spirit and you consciously act selflessly.

Once you get hold of selflessness, you’ll be dragged

You Are the Journey’s End

Think of yourself as a radio trying to tune in to higher spiritual frequencies. Keeping yourself plugged into the divine current deepens and enriches your understanding of how the universe operates. As your attunement with the divine current grows ever stronger, so too does your yearning for God.

There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.
Blaise Pascal

Surrender to this longing. Let it consume you. Live your life so that everything you think, say, and do brings you ever nearer to God.

Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.
Sri Ramakrishna

Every day in which you joyously dive into

If You Understand God, You Have Failed

Self-realization—the doorway to enlightenment—comes when you know through direct contact with God that you are one with divine consciousness in body, mind, and spirit. This exalted state of conscious unity with the divine cannot be explained; it can only be experienced.

Words end where truth begins.
Various scriptures

Humbly acknowledging that God is beyond knowing does not alter your conviction—you know that you

Seeing Through the Fog

Carl Jung

The four steps to enlightenment are learning, believing, knowing, and being. Each of these steps demands more courage and faith than the one before. Their order is absolute—none may be leapfrogged.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering by instant illumination. Most of us acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anais Nin

The chasm between believing and knowing can be traversed with a single bound. It is the distinction between faith that flows from intellectually knowing about God versus

Sit Down In the Fire

The step-by-step transformation from ignorance to cosmic consciousness is vividly portrayed in the blockbuster movie, The Matrix. In the beginning, Neo, the central character, is clueless that his world is an elaborate fabrication. Exposed to the truth, he continues to resist until the existence of a different reality can no longer be ignored. Over time, he wraps his mind around the concept until it is fully integrated into his consciousness. Finally, as his life hangs in the balance, he experiences an epiphany and becomes one with the cosmos.

If your knowledge of fire has been turned to certainty by words alone, then seek to be cooked by the fire itself. Don’t abide in borrowed certainty. There is no real certainty until you burn; if you wish for this, sit down in the fire.
Rumi

Neo’s journey—fictional, yes,