Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Meditate upon the Om that is in the heart.
Interpretation
This quote encourages deep introspection and connection with the inner self through meditation.
Swami Vivekananda emphasizes the importance of meditation on the divine sound 'Om', suggesting that it is a pathway to realizing a deeper understanding of oneself and the universe. By focusing on 'Om', which symbolizes the essence of the ultimate reality, individuals can cultivate inner peace and spiritual awareness.
In practice
This quote can be used in a meditation workshop to encourage participants to focus inward.
Everything can be sacrificed for truth, but truth cannot be sacrificed for anything.
Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented before us by the great sage Valmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster, none more beautiful, and at the same time simpler, than the language in which the great poet has depicted the life of Rama.
Hinduism threw away Buddhism after taking its sap. The attempt of all the Southern Acharyas was to effect a reconciliation between the two. Shankaracharya's teaching shows the influence of Buddhism. His disciples perverted his teaching and carried it to such an extreme point that some of the later reformers were right in calling the Acharya's followers "crypto-buddhists".
According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already.
I have come to deal with principles. I have only to preach that God comes again and again, and that He came in India as Krishna, Rama, and Buddha, and that He will come again. It can almost be demonstrated that after each 500 years the world sinks, and a tremendous spiritual wave comes, and on the top of the wave is a Christ.
Salvation means knowing the truth. We do not become anything; we are what we are. Salvation [comes] by faith and not by work. It is a question of knowledge! You must know what you are, and it is done. The dream vanishes. This you [and others] are dreaming here. When they die, they go to [the] heaven [of their dream]. They live in that dream, and [when it ends], they take a nice body [here], and they are good people.
Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things: a one-track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive . . .
Like an ethereal presence_x000D_ You hang out everywhere._x000D_ Not a naughty or scary goblin,_x000D_ Rather, an inquisitive observer,_x000D_ A concerned, caring custodian,_x000D_ Visiting every niche and closet_x000D_ Where we stuff the undesired_x000D_ Of our messy, blemished lives,_x000D_ You haunt territories we ignore,_x000D_ Hoping we will find you there.
There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.
Your believing or not believing in karma has no effect on its existence, nor on its consequences to you. Just as a refusal to believe in the ocean would not prevent you from drowning.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.