ALL ONE

Question: Is it necessary to renounce the world?

Anandamayi Ma: "No, why? Where is the place where God is not? The natural way of life itself could be transformed into the spiritual way of life. In fact, there is nothing which can be 'other' to God; so properly speaking, to live in the world is to be on the way to Self-realization. Since this perspective has been lots to us we perforce speak in the language of  'otherness to God'. To realize one's self means to discover that there is naught else except God, God alone is, and all else is God only."

The Path to Self-Abidance

 “Fold back the speech into the mind. Fold the mind into the intellect. Fold that intellect into the ‘witness’ of the intellect. After gaining perfectly the attitude of a witness to one’s own thought processes, this witnessing faculty also should be folded into the tranquil Atman, the Supreme Self.”

 

-Kathopanishad 1.3.13

Isvara Pranidhana (Surrender of the Ego)

  

Lord, take me where You want me to go;
Let me meet who You want me to meet;
Tell me what You want me to say; and
Keep me out of your way.

Father Mychal Judge

Realization

 

"To me, there is no desire for the continuance of enjoyments, nor for the abandoning of enjoyments, Whatever comes, let it come. Whatever departs let it go.

"When the mind is destroyed by the mind and has arrived at the state devoid of egotism, and when thought has dropped down (or vanished) through thought, I remain self-abiding and alone"

-"The Story of Prahlaaada" in The Essence of Yoga Vasishta (Samata Books)

Vedanta from the Creator of HBO's 'Deadwood'

 

"When I was writing Deadwood, my formal voice changed....The reason that happened then I think is that I accepted that the formal voice is God's voice. No matter how you distort it or reverb it, it's still God's voice. Once you accept that, when you're writing, the question becomes, what would be necessary to God, if the narrator has to be true to the narrator's nature and the characters have to be true to their natures? If we were to say that God as a narrator wants to place the characters in a situation most congenial to their discovery of their deepest nature - which is that their sense of themselves as separate is predicated on an upper misapprehension, and they are all one thing - how would you go about telling the story."

"...The idea of being an auteur, I don't believe in that. I don't care whose name is on a script. We are organs of a larger organism which knows us although we do not know it. I regard myself as vessel of whatever that larger organism is, its instrument, rather than as the source of the scenes. So a lot of what I do is try to get out of the way. That's the way I work in my writing. That's the way I work with the actors. That's he way I edit. It put me in the path of an enormous amount of energy."

-David Milch, writer of creator/writer of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, in his recent memoir, Life's Work.