Quotes about Transcendence

Keep in mind, always, the principle of evolution through the operation of which everything physical is eternally reaching upward and trying to complete the cycle between finite and infinite intelligences.

What will happen to our consciousness after we die? A. What happens to consciousness when we're still alive? If you can answer that question, the other question will be answered as well.

If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time. Some say that suffering is only an illusion or that to live wisely we have to "transcend" both suffering and joy. I say the opposite. The way to suffer well and be happy is to stay in touch with what is actually going on; in doing so, you will gain liberating insights into the true nature of suffering and of joy.

We can learn many practices to lessen our sadness and our suffering, but the cream of enlightened wisdom is the insight of no birth, no death.

The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself.

Whenever everyone's eyes are fixed on the earth—looking at the trees, plants, hills, mountains, or each other—then we know we are in the historical dimension, the world of birth and death. But when everyone's eyes look into space then we have entered the ultimate dimension, the unborn and undying world.

Living the holy life, transcending time and space, you are revered by both men and gods.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.

The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.

The true spiritual life is a life neither of dionysian orgy nor of apollonian clarity: it transcends both. It is a life of wisdom, a life of sophianic love. In Sophia, the highest wisdom-principle, all the greatness and majesty of the unknown that is in God and all that is rich and maternal in His creation are united inseparably, as paternal and maternal principles, the uncreated Father and created Mother-Wisdom.

If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner I, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the I AM of the Almighty.

It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be.