existence

It is only through Art and through Art only that we can realize our perfection; Through Art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of being.

This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky,
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

A Sword in Each Hand

If you dare to take up the banner of enlightenment,

you will be attacked from all sides.

From the inside you will be attacked by your own mind

and from the outside you will be attacked by everyone else's mind.

Anyone who dares to succeed automatically presents a huge threat.

If true freedom is going to survive within you,

you have to be willing to fight for it.

You have to have a sword in each hand at all times.

One sword is for your own mind and the other sword is for everyone else's mind. You must be ready to use them.

Anyone who wants to be truly free must be willing to stand alone in the truth.

The  ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a spec of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.

She smiled.  She knew she was dying.  But it did not matter any longer.  She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now.  She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it.  Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dropped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came.  A moment or an eternity- did it matter?  Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.

Fax me a fact and I’ll telegram a hologram
or telephone the son of man and tell him he
is done. Leave a message on his answering
machine telling him there are none. God and
I are one. Times moon. Times star. Times sun.
The factor is me. You remember me.

A leader is most effective when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, his troops will feel they did it themselves.

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.