Mysticism Quotes - Page 4

There are no such things as accidents. Only fate redesigned.

Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the die will come up proximately 1 ,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come approximately up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable.But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term "probability" includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification. Cf. Ernst Mally's Probability and Law, Hans Reichenbach The theory Probability, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, von Mises' Probability, Statistics and Truth

Max Frisch

This human need for mysticism – surrender to an unknown truth, union – stands at the helm of all romantic feeling. It is, in essence, the same intimacy known in a mother’s arms; in those who are deprived of the experience, the need freezes and, distorted, it can rent a life. All addiction has as its foundation skewed yearning for the same transcendence. For me, the spell of the material was broken by my brother’s death; after his suicide, all I wanted was the renewal of my connection to the intangible.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke

When you come to a place where you have to left or right,' says Sister Ruth, 'go straight ahead.

Kathleen Norris

When things are good, it is because we remember a time when they were not. When there was pain. But now the pain is gone, so things are ‘good’. When we hurt, it is because we recall a time when we did not. When there was no pain. But now we suffer, so things are ‘bad’. The tiger sipped from the cup, peering at the boy over the rim. Stars swirled in its eyes. “Good. Bad. The cup holds both.

Brooke Burgess

It is through your experience you find out who you really are and who you are is from finding your own experience who really defines you.

Charleston Parker

That's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.

Barbara Ehrenreich

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.I’m a mystic, but only in my body,My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

Alberto Caeiro

What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky!

Eli Of Kittim

To place Jesus Christ in the class of mystics is an insult to the Highest.

Paul Bamikole

Mystical insight and enlightenment occur when the veil between the worlds is lifted, the worlds are bridged, the gap closes, and we cross over.

Tom Cowan

...on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you've shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as "What does he mean by 'magic' anyhow? It's embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?" Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, "Doesn't the author realize that one can't write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It's much too gossamer for that. Magic can be neither described nor defined. Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to slice roast beef."To which the author now replies, Sorry, freeloaders, you're clever but you're not quite correct. Magic isn't the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality. Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base. Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial.

Tom Robbins

Be silent like a rock, deeply rooted and straight like a tree, bend like a reed in the wind, listen to the sounds that your ears ignore, and feel the world through your intuition. The latter will never betray you, your senses will!

Irina Serban

What's wisdom if not the will to learn the lessons, which Nature puts in one's way at every step?

Irina Serban

There is something divine, mystical, magical and unexplainable in the universe that is listening and responding to each of us.

Bryant McGill

The most fundamental, basic need in magick, is the development of the will. The magus says, “I will, and not heaven nor hell can stop me.” It is in this forming and growing, creating, of the will, where heaven and hell learns to follow the will of the magus. A person who wants to develop the soul must never say, “Maybe” or “If I see a sign” because the master creates his own signs. If you need a star to align in front of a tree because that to you would be a sign, then you make the star align with the tree, if not in this world, in the other worlds and in the other dimensions. There are no “ifs” and there are no “maybes” there are only “I wills.” This is the basic platform of magick, and most people never get past it, because not all can.

C. JoyBell C.

We know what wood is and what earth and stone are and that they have a color and texture, a smell and even a taste, but matter as a perceptible material substance independent of the nature of the wood, earth and stone composed of it seems incomprehensible. In order for us to regard a thing as real it must possess at least some distinctive physical qualities. We must be able to experience it as a physical thing before we can decide it is real. Matter as proposed by modern science, however, has no distinctive or definite physical qualities at all. Matter is simply some unimaginable stuff possessing no conceivable definition whatsoever. The concept of matter, then, proves to be just as elusive and abstract as the concepts of spirit, soul or the life-principle.

Ojo Blacke

He said he’d heard the sound of one hand clapping. He said, once his mind took in the wondrous no-sound of holy oneness, the empty echo of eternal bliss, he was never the same. He could hear it still, he said, resounding in the ether and tickling the back of his brain.Something not normal was going on with his brain. No argument there.

Brenda Marie Smith

Mother Nature gave Jesus, the Son of Nature the biological elements to see things that nobody else could, or rather nobody else would. And you are the child of Nature as well. As such you have all the powers within you, just like Jesus, to rise above the laws of the society that tend to bind your conscience with textual mysticism and fanaticism.

Abhijit Naskar

That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it?

Peter Washington

A banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than a place, more than a geophysical area.

Michael Billig

When you view your world exclusively through the lens of science, your prescription will never be strong enough.

Jay Nichols

Prove to the world that you are alive, let your words breathe life into the nostrils of the universe.

Michael Bassey Johnson

If you don’t practice presence, you never learn how to have busyness facilitate accomplishment.

Darrell Calkins

As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.

Darrell Calkins

General attitude and outlook—the way we perceive and experience anything—is more influenced by our physical state than anything other single factor. I’d guess that for most of us, at least 50% of our struggles and discontent are brought on by being physically out of balance. The causes of that imbalance are many, but at the core, there’s an insensitivity or inability to locate and maneuver essential physical processes within us: how to breathe, how to sit, stand and walk, how to see and hear, how to slow down or speed up, how to relax, how to sleep, how to eat, how to adjust our physiological responses to the different circumstances we find ourselves within. This kind of removal or abstraction from our physicality causes an enormous amount of problems on many levels. One key result of it is a distrust in our own ability to influence our emotional state and our energy and perspectives in general; we often feel that we can’t get our hands on the control switches, as if most of life just happens and we can’t do much about it.

Darrell Calkins

On an even subtler dimension, clarity, intuitive knowledge and contentment are primarily determined by chemical and hormonal balances in the body and brain. Most of this is entirely manipulable through fairly simple physical exercises that anyone can do.

Darrell Calkins

In my work, I try to create situations in which we take ideas, information, experiences and qualities to a pragmatic arena. Then within those, to relearn or experiment with how we respond to internal and external variables. There’s no point to understanding something but remaining incapable of applying it. I think real knowledge and understanding is experiential, and the easiest way to access those is through our physical being.

Darrell Calkins

Traditional stoicism, indifference to pleasure or pain, is a form of imposing conscience so as to block more immediate desires. The problem is that it eventually collapses on itself because natural emotional and physiological impulses are being ignored or repressed. To pass beyond that dichotomy—”I want to eat ice cream, and yet I don’t”—requires conceiving and creating an integrated mind in which our passions and childlike impulses find expression through conscience. In other words, what we feel like doing and what we “should” do become one and the same.

Darrell Calkins

We don’t know how to feel with conscience. Ideas like integrity or devotion remain abstract, theoretically correct and good, but lacking the ability to produce immediately fulfilling emotions or sensations. What I mean by learning to think emotionally and physiologically is rediscovering the visceral joy of investing in what we already love, the kind of unquestioned spiritual relentlessness we had as kids. As adults, that demands an internal dialogue through which we transpose the search for pleasure onto a platform that is in harmony with our conscience and real responsibilities. We find the pleasure in applied conscience. That’s a lot easier than it sounds. Basically, it’s about recognizing and feeling passion for what we really want to do in our lives.

Darrell Calkins

On those who try to make me their guru or master, my approach is to start destroying that from the first moment we meet. It probably seems naive and idealistic, but I rely on basic, old-fashioned qualities in keeping my interactions clean: integrity, chivalry, honesty. In my experience, it’s not that difficult to eliminate the guru paradigm and stereotype, if one really wants to. Finally, it comes down to simply not accepting a role or the associated temptations offered.

Darrell Calkins

There is a pivot point, however, to become an adult. That transition comes from recognizing and acting in accordance with your own deepest impulses. On the responsibility front, that means acting in harmony with your conscience, not because you’re going to be punished if you don’t, or paid for it if you do (heaven, enlightenment, salvation, or whatever), but because you know it to be right. On the freedom front, that means acquiescing to your deepest inspirations, following what truly compels you, even when it’s difficult to do so. These two principles brought together in the same time and space is what integrity is all about. And it is only through such integrity that you resolve conflict between the two of them: what you “know to do” and what you “want to do.

Darrell Calkins

Whether or not one believes in the accelerating dangers of the climate crisis, the end of fossil fuels, or the permanent annihilation of species of plants, insects and animals that essentially cover our ass by maintaining an inconceivably complex environment in which we have the freedom and responsibility to do pretty much whatever we’d like, it’s not too difficult to at least perceive the dangers of heightened tensions between cultures that now, for the first time, have the power to annihilate each other or the entire planet.

Darrell Calkins

We all understand the value of sacrifice, even if that only involves setting aside dessert so as to lose weight, or putting money in the bank so as to later buy a house. Progress or achievement in any arena requires choices that often oppose what one feels like doing. The trick in truly succeeding with this in the long run is locating enough depth of feeling that the experience of conflicting desires dissolves. For that to happen, one has to learn how to think emotionally and physiologically.

Darrell Calkins

There are some things that don’t function as one would assume. For example, the impulse and linear thinking associated with the search for happiness most often produce questions like, “What’s in it for me?” or “How do I get what I want?” Paradoxically, if you will, that very question pushes authentic happiness away. Now, to try to explain that to someone in such a way that they hear and are interested by the idea is going to probably involve some paradox and non-linearity.

Darrell Calkins

Freedom and responsibility themselves are at stake. One does not find freedom or enact responsibility by surrendering to another’s conceptualization of these ideas. Living out the rules of conscience laid down by someone else for the attainment of an unquestioned goal, a freedom designed and articulated by someone else, is the surrender of human imagination and intuition.In the more extreme versions of this, we end up with a collective momentum resulting in events such as Nazi extermination of millions of Jews, the Inquisition, or similar events recently in Africa and elsewhere. That comes from allocating one’s conscience to someone else, not attending to one’s own deeper intuitive sense of right and wrong.

Darrell Calkins

Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others.

Darrell Calkins

We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.

Darrell Calkins

Whether or not we personally do impact some ultimate evolution beyond ourselves, we can definitely influence what happens today. To choose to waste a day, or a lifetime, is opposed to the essential spirit of life, expressed, sacrificed for, and upheld through every perceivable interaction in nature. It’s also opposed to every human expression of spirit throughout history. We know to live up to our potential, to fulfill the trust of creation by moving forward, even if we don’t believe it or feel like it or know why.

Darrell Calkins

The primary reason that I’m not a representative of specific groups or schools of thought is that that choice gives me the freedom to look at these groups and thoughts from the inside and the outside. I’m trying to be honest in that role—what really works here and what does not? That is, I have nothing to sell or win by any given position. I’m promoting a similar process for any person I interact with in my work, including toward me.Investment in a given idea or group tends to immediately shut down options for perception, and then choice. Prejudice, bigotry and arrogance breed from that. One is forced to think a certain way to stay within the group or thought, and then to defend against apparent opposition. This constructs and feeds the kinds of adamant separation and conflict we see so many manifestations of on every level. In many cases, it’s also the cause of deep internal conflict in most individuals, yet it isn’t really addressed.

Darrell Calkins

It’s misleading or deceptive in a way that such skills are learned like any other — simple practice, sincere investment over time. Yes, like small steps, one at a time, to cross the bridge. Just a single step today.

Darrell Calkins

The sweet spot is a term used by audiophiles and recording engineers to describe the focal point between two sources of sound, where an individual is fully capable of hearing the audio mix the way it was intended to be heard by the musicians. Different static methods exist to broaden the area of the sweet spot.Sound engineers also refer to the sweet spot of any sound-producing body that may be captured with a microphone. Every individual instrument and voice has its own sweet spot, the perfect location to place the microphone or microphones in order to obtain the best sound.In tennis, baseball, or cricket, a given swing will result in a more powerful impact if the ball strikes the racquet or bat on the sweet spot, where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort. The actual sweet spot on a racquet or bat is a very small area, where dispersing vibrations and spin in multiple directions are canceled out, resulting in a perfect contact point between incoming and outgoing energies.

Darrell Calkins

I don’t really consider myself to be a teacher, although I understand that others do. There’s a certain restriction or reduction in that stereotype that doesn’t ring true. Especially the underlying assumption that I know something that others don’t, and my job is to give them what I know. That’s simply not true.

Darrell Calkins

There’s a tunnel between our external skill sets and our deepest longings and passions. People with the highest developed skills always know how to traverse that tunnel. That is, personal integration and wholeness — and consequent accomplishment and fulfillment — are largely about “enlightening” the tool with the best we have in us. The tool could be anything — a voice or body, a musical instrument or paint brush, a trowel or computer. But skill is made up of capability, and that requires practiced familiarity over time with how to inject into the moment our unique talents, virtues and qualities.

Darrell Calkins

Recent discoveries in developmental psychology and other behavioral disciplines have shown that babies are born with a “first draft” of a moral mind. Among others, brain scientist, Gary Marcus, has described this moral understanding as “already defined and organized before experience.” Evolutionary psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, describes this first draft of the moral mind as consisting of five primary values. Modern cross-cultural anthropologists point to these same five primary values as the foundation of all cultures, currently and historically, and 21st century ethologists suggest the same values apply to most if not all species.

Darrell Calkins

There is something mysterious yet definitely accessible to us all under the agitated waves of difficulty that allows us to feel and flow along a more comprehensive intuitive and spiritual understanding of true meaning. And to find solace, accepting serenity and even beauty within it.

Darrell Calkins

What is it that we do here? By easing away from the mania that pulls on us, recalling and reconnecting with our essential spirit and callings, we regenerate our core inspiration and faith in Life and our place within it…with a purposeful eye toward facilitating evolution toward ‘More capable human beings,’ meaning grander, freer, more authentic and meaningfully effective.How do we do that? By delving into pockets of rituals that have, across traditions and cultures, produced superior forms of insight and understanding, healing, evolution and resolution. One could call these tunnels into beauty, truth and love. And we can find access to them in any given day of our lives.

Darrell Calkins

My personal sense of presence that I kind of carry around with me is along the lines of “Somebody has to be there first before acting.” The more one is there, the better the results in whatever you’re doing — more precision, subtlety, relevance…and much less dispersion and depletion. When you watch someone who is good at this, you can sometimes feel like they’re actually stretching out the walls of possibility in a given situation, literally creating open space. Much of this comes only through time and experience, eventual understanding that how one does something, not the specifics of action, is what impacts others most.

Darrell Calkins

My hope and intent is to provide a wide range of resources and ideas that provoke real questions and considerations under the surface of common dialogue. With a definite thrust toward clues for moving beyond limiting patterns that restrict our personal and communal evolution and experience of, as well as effectiveness in, life. Part of that is about giving different angles of insight into the why and how of developing skills, whatever they may be. I think the larger discussion, or maybe the more relevant one surrounding skills development, involves what quality of fuel is being used to run the skill. Inevitably, and very quickly, this enters into considerations of how much of oneself one brings to the show. For example, anyone can learn a sophisticated skill in an extremely short period of time, once they’re completely convinced of the need, benefit and value of doing so and find enough full-bodied conviction to engage it accordingly (“You never hear anyone practicing a language; they simply listen and then begin to speak.” — Wade Davis).

Darrell Calkins

These five values are the organic origins of what could be called intuitive conscience. They are also what we experience personally as our core, essential yearnings, however distorted or confused we may interpret them: to care and be cared for; to share equally in freedom and responsibility; to belong, and to trust that what we belong to will continue; that there exists an objective hierarchy of virtue and wisdom; that there exists that which is unquestionably sacred or divine.

Darrell Calkins

We survive largely because of the existence and recognition of high-end qualities—compassion, integrity, courage, humility, etc. These are how we perceive spirit. Even the most cynical and fatalistic bastard will snap out of self-absorption, abuse and hopelessness when confronted by an extreme expression of any one of these qualities. (Case studies show that this also applies even to rapists and murderers, not always, but more so than any other technique or therapy.) That is, beyond belief, the desire to feel good, or even hope or despair, there does exist an essential intuitive value system in each of us. This runs through and across every culture, and even every species. I don’t believe that those intuitive values are there to fool us into occupying ourselves so as to feel good while waiting for the inevitable to happen. Nature is not so decadent. Or cynical.

Darrell Calkins

One could make a nice link between imagination and spirit. To make that link, all we need is some inspiration. Essentially, imagination has the innate potential to compel or inspire and to set in motion causation. That’s why it exists.

Darrell Calkins

Preceding the birth of every religion, there was someone who was an incarnation of this process: imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which causes imagination…the dynamic that takes place in the dimension of spirit. That is, for whatever reasons that will remain mysterious, although they are suggested in various schools of thought, someone got the cause thing down right, and the rest flowed. After the fact, an effort was made, almost always by others, to control both the impact of this and the possible benefits from it. Ambition and desire took over. Where you had an exact presentation, or manifestation, of beauty and truth, somebody began using it for other purposes.

Darrell Calkins

In the quest for a functional and direct interaction between imagination and reality, and the evolution of them both, there is in place a natural resistance, which I have referred to as Creative Resistance, because it demands just that: creativity. Much of this calls for redefining, or refining, one’s relationship with time, and all the qualities and skills that will only come from engaging time more creatively and effectively. As such, part of the bargain is about acquiescing to a rhythm that is subtler and has more definite purpose to it than one’s subjective preferences.

Darrell Calkins

The seed of all this is imagination. But when you think of imagination, it helps to view it more as it exists in the rest of nature, rather than as we tend to see it in humans. That is, that imagination is actual and a need, immediately searches for expression, and con- sequently, is intimately connected to yearning and its instantaneous application. This is also the case in human beings, but we generally associate it with unnecessary, or extra, expression, such as an ability to make something more attractive or stimulating (the current view of art, for example), or the creative use of “free time” (time left over after you have done what you had to do).

Darrell Calkins

In an animal’s or a plant’s expression of imagination (let’s leave out the rest for now, so we don’t have to deal with the question of consciousness in, for example, minerals), there is always purity in the connection between need and evolution. That which is created is a response to reality and very specific, essential concerns. This then is the origin of the union between what is so and mysterious harmony—truth and beauty. The bridge between them is inspired intuition and the actions it causes. Or, imagination causes inspiration causes intuition causes beauty, which then causes imagination again…

Darrell Calkins

There are so many stereotypes, prepackaged concepts and platitudes out there in our thinking on the divine, and the associated emotions those produce; it’s very difficult to transcend. But that’s ultimately what experiencing the divine is all about: transcending stereotypes, concepts and platitudes. As soon as one falls back on an acceptable definition or understanding, it disappears. It’s like water; the moment you try to grasp it, you lose it.

Darrell Calkins

The purest definition of “religious” is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality.

Darrell Calkins

Resolution of conflicting interests within each of us—the desire to fulfill a personal purpose versus the desire to forget about it and just go have fun, for example—takes time and focus and application of a lot of qualities, like playing a difficult piece of music with two hands on the piano. Many people are looking for a simple pill to make that apparent dichotomy go away. Once they discover it doesn’t exist, it’s very frustrating.

Darrell Calkins

The simple, external acts in which you resolve shame and guilt, and set right a debt, by passing by them all and giving something grander even so and instead of. You end the circle by leaving it behind. Conscience brings awareness of the need to change something, but the source of your actions must become inspiration and devotion. You’re not doing it to get out of debt; you are doing it because you know it to be the thing to do.

Darrell Calkins

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Mysticism Quotes - Page 4

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