The waves are counted by those who listen in the dark, not by those who see the sea.
Man, freed from his individuality, is in common with God. The omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.
The man freed from his individuality is not omniscient in the sense that he can tell you how much money is in a closed purse, that he knows tomorrow's newspaper today, that he can answer any question you may have with certainty. What would seem to people to be omniscience: an infinite repository of data; omniscience is not a set, but the knowledge of something simpler than 'one'.
He is not omnipotent enough to turn bread into a calabash; nor can he perhaps lift the sack which a sack-bearer easily carries. What would seem to men omnipotence: the infinite increase of success in life. He is omnipotent in such a way that, while he is going about his ordinary work, he carries in the depths of his being the action-less, complete operation of God.
It is not so omnipresent that if he is present in York, he would also be present in New York. What would appear to men as omnipresence: the full filling of space. It is omnipresent in that it reaches to the existent, to the point of no extension, which includes everything.
Achieving wholeness is infinitely easy and infinitely difficult. It is as easy and as difficult as saying these three words without lying and self-deception: 'I'm completely pure.' But there are, very few, simple poor people who, without striving for it and without knowing it, possess perfection. All their feelings, thoughts, intentions are pure, everything is good for them as it happens to be offered; if they have to lose property, health, family, life: they resign themselves to that without difficulty. Their life is quiet and peaceful, and their peace can be violated by no one and nothing. From their words you may not derive much, but from their being you may derive the universe itself.
These peaceful, happy people will not attain to perfection, to heaven: they are already there, there is no power that can add to them or take from them. They live on an endless high mountain, from which there is no further.
Don't tolerate in yourself the seeds of any desire to assert yourself. For as you can advance in life, so you will slide back in yourself.
Do not strive for excellence. But that does not mean neglecting your abilities. You will advance in yourself if you make your abilities as full and coherent as possible; no matter how great your abilities are, the main thing is to make the best of them and by them.
Your abilities are the steeds that will carry you to the final house; but you can only enter the house if you keep your steeds outside. Every faculty has its measure; and the final gate is only accessible to that which is immeasurable: the soul itself.
He who has principles or talents, feels himself excellent; he who has scraped together a heap of rubbish, or is praised, feels himself excellent. Recognize that the nightingale sings well, the dog barks well, the sheep eats the grass well, the man eats the sheep, and the grass eats the man's carcass: everything is in its place, everything dances its dance perfectly, and there is no excellence.
The harmony is complete and undisturbed. All the many separate things have independent demands that might disturb harmony: these are brought into harmony by the dance of death. Do not strive for excellence, but strive to achieve harmony within yourself, to be free from all separate demands, and then you will be free from the dance of death.
He who desires happiness is always in a rush, and his rush is in harmony. He who desires harmony is happy.
Don't covet what is commonly called fame and glory: for famous men stand like a heap of cakes in a shop window, and curiosity is a fly in the ointment and a cloud of filthiness; fame is not glory, but misery and humiliation. Thou shalt not covet what is commonly called eternal fame, immortality: for it shall profit you nothing if your memory remains in the memory of future generations after your death, like a shrivelled mummy in a pyramid. What the great men call immortality is not eternal life, not even eternal memory, but oblivion postponed for a few hundred or a few thousand years. Observe these slower oblivionists: how terrifying their squalid, dusty permanence. A royal silence is theirs, a golden and silver crypt-silence. Not their lives, but their deaths, stretching back centuries or decades.
Your glory and your immortality do not depend on your fellow man, for it is in you or it is not in you. The European man does not want to be so great as to fulfil the full potential of his existence, but only as a great lighthouse disappearing into the night. Do not be content with the measurable, but strive only for the whole greatness.
For those who want to reach wholeness: the most stubborn obstacle that clings like a thistle: vanity. The man who consciously approaches wholeness feels excellence, superiority. And as long as he has a feeling of superiority, his individuality cannot dissolve, because only the individual can be superior or inferior, there are no differences in wholeness. The way to perfection is not the way of the excellent, but of all that are different: it is the way of all, even if they are unaware of it. And if you feel yourself to be different from those who are at the beginning of the path, and different from those who have already reached the end: you will be deceived by the delusion of time; for whether one is at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the path, is only a difference of date.
The reason thinks by turning thoughts into a series of words. Whoever penetrates behind his intellect, into the world of infinite currents, here comes to a different form of thought, which may be called "angelic intellect": the spiritual contents do not appear as words, but as stationary and moving figures in an otherworldly space; here are not happy, sad, pleasant, unpleasant thoughts, but round, angular, smooth, strong, monochrome, variegated thoughts. There is an unnameable blend of sharpness and dullness, of brilliance and gloom, which covers everything, which may best be called 'music without sound'; it is the music of the angels, the music of the spheres.
And beyond the infinite currents, in the union of totality, there is another form of thought: this is the "divine intellect" in which the thinker, the object of thought, and the thought are identical.
Whenever you can free yourself from your circumstances: the final state, in which life and death are identical, unfolds in you like a boundless radiance.
The ultimate gift: a motionless dance, a sweetness beyond taste, beyond measure.
Whoever reaches out to the infinite currents behind his person will gradually notice that his bodily senses are being peculiarly enriched. Whomever you pay close attention to with your eyes, ears, or in any other way, his form and present state are almost reflected in you, and also that of the phenomena that are passing or persisting. When you speak to someone, you perceive not only their words, but what emanates from their being; and they think you are a mind-reader. And all that is reflected in you in this way is as if it were colour; not only does your eye see colour, but an inner, hidden eye does too.
The souls of inanimate objects are dark purple, of plants green, of animals dark yellow, brown, reddish. The dullness is brown, the spiritual richness is the play of grey in bright light colours. The colour of agile souls is paler, more articulated, more variable; that of ponderous souls is darker, more uniform, more constant. The basic colour of a child's soul is like a luminous pearl; that of a man is a cold greyish-blue, which is mostly darkened, faded, browned, reddened; that of a woman is purplish-red, and this is mostly inclined very early to the colour of a withered petal. The few men who grow old in such a way that their old age is a noble withering, not a forced fading: all the colour of ore, silver, bronze, gold.
The spiritual sense of colour is in fact there for everyone, but not everyone takes care of it and not everyone develops it in themselves. One can feel flaring anger as red, helpless anger as poison green and bright lemon yellow, daydreaming as purple and pink, broad cheerfulness as red, quiet cheerfulness as metallic light, boredom as pale grey, sorrow as dark blue, hopelessness as black.
Angels and devils of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms: fairies, elves. They are not beings; they are not in time, but in the unchanging.
Observe a group of sparrows soaring above: what in their wing-noise is not the sound of nature, but some sweet simplicity: this is the fairy of the sparrow-flock. Or observe a walnut-tree: if you pluck it, it bears its fruit reluctantly and grudgingly; and if you approach it gently and respectfully, it will willingly give, and you will see on the lower branches, which seem to be stripped, the most available and hitherto unnoticed nuts: this is the fairy of the walnut-tree.
If you arrange the contents of your inner being; if you separate within yourself the changing transitory elements of your person and the unchanging, eternal world of your being: the transitory elements appear to you as objects, plants, animals, so to speak, and you can interact with the factors of the eternal world. Suddenly you notice in your solitude that you are learning from someone without the use of mouth or ears; and at first you do not know whether you are imagining it or whether a disembodied being has descended to you. Your invisible teacher is not a mirage, nor a spirit descended to you, but one of the infinite currents that lie beneath your person. The infinite currents are the formers and guides of the personality, which can be accessed and interrogated after the personality has been broken through. Anyone can be in touch with them, only not everyone knows it; intuition, the sudden realization without precedent, is always a suggestion of one of the infinite currents.
The infinite currents behind the personality are called angels by Christians, gods by the ancient Greeks, and devas by the Indians. Who are these angels, gods, and devas? They are not persons; they are the soul-powers pervading the universe; they are not spirits outside our own being and descending to us, nor are they parts of our own being, but they are the forces of the naked soul emerging from under the cloak of personality; the soul which is not 'my soul' or a 'separate soul', but the 'soul', without limit.
The individuality-obsessed man of today has lost the knowledge of angels; he does not believe in invisible winged creatures descending from the air, and he is right. But he does not know that his personality and his soul are not identical; that behind his temporal personality lies the non-temporal soul, which is not one's soul, but is undivided, boundless; and that the various manifestations of the soul are angels; they are hidden in him like a multitude of colors in a colorless sunbeam. And he who penetrates beneath his transitory person, comes into contact with the angels, as a prisoner who breaks the prison window comes into contact with the pure air.
There are other kinds of angels: an angel of a landscape, an angel of a family, an angel of a nation and many more. And there are devils. An angel or devil is not a person, but it is not a symbol. If you notice in any of your manifestations that which is not temporal, not enclosed, not your own: it is the angel or the devil.
A general human frailty: greed, frivolity, avarice, etc., is as unenclosed and unindividual as the soul. From profligate to profligate, from miser to miser, an invisible current runs, not in space, yet almost palpable: this current is the devil.
Between angel and devil there is no more sharp boundary than between good and bad man. The infinite currents behind your personality, if you access them, behave like angels; if you pile the dross of life on top of them, they behave like devils.
Dismantle your character and the world will come into you.
Dissolve the world that has become your character and wholeness will come into you.
He who begins to dismantle his individuality loses more and more the boundary between his own soul and the souls of others. When he looks into the eyes of his fellow man, he senses his feelings and recognises: 'this is me'; when he strokes a dog, he senses its world merging into one: 'this is me'; when he touches a piece of furniture for a long time, he takes in its indivisible silence: 'this is me'. His own soul is no longer his own, and the soul of everything is his own; everything is transparent, as if it were made of crystal; at once immensely rich, his body and soul are refreshed and filled with the same joy of work, rest, company, solitude.
Don't expect a miracle. Because the promise of a miracle is fulfilled without a miracle.
If you want to penetrate into the world of the larger-than-life, larger-than-self, or into your real being (here "I" and "other" cannot be separated): be careful not to get involved in illusions, "miracles" instead of reality. Frequent prayer, frequent introspection, is the protection against this. Nowhere are vigilance and sobriety so necessary as here, where the standards of life are not applicable.
If you want to know your timeless base-layer, you must first grapple with your layered over temporal person, which hides the base from you. Dismantle your person and see it as a stranger. Let nothing remain hidden, unexamined, unconscious. Let nothing remain in it that you cling to or hate, because both clinging and hating are falsifying.
The simplest way of self-examination is prayer. If in prayer you confess your faults to God, you will have penetrated every nook and cranny of your person, because man, in prayer, is honest before God; he is always lying to himself, but he dares not lie to God. And if you have asked God's help, you bring into operation the help that is unknown under your person.
If you strive to follow the eternal standard, do not be offended at those who do not strive to do so, unless their efforts are fluctuating between many finite and changing standards. Look not at what they have not, but at what they have: for even the most miserable have spiritual treasures which you lack. Anyone can make excuses, anyone can be superior; learn to learn from everyone.