If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.
RamakrishnaRead
A man develops a subtle power as a result of the strict observance of celibacy for twelve years. Then he can understand and grasp very subtle things which otherwise elude his intellect. Through that understanding the aspirant can have direct vision of God. That pure understanding alone enables him to realize Truth.
Interpretation
Celibacy fosters profound spiritual insight and understanding.
The quote emphasizes the transformative power of celibacy and discipline over a long period. It suggests that by practicing celibacy for twelve years, an individual gains heightened awareness and clarity, allowing them to perceive deep spiritual truths and ultimately experience a direct connection with the divine, which is essential for realizing ultimate truth.
In practice
During a seminar on spiritual growth, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of discipline in achieving higher knowledge.
If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.
The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.
You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? Because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.
Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say 'I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me' free you shall be.
Whoever wants God intensely, finds Him. Go and verify it in your own life.
One day, it was suddenly revealed to me that everything is pure spirit.
Only free men can negotiate; prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.
Let him that would move the world first move himself.
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