If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.
Interpretation
Understanding and connecting with the divine can provide deeper insights than human teachings.
This quote emphasizes the importance of spiritual awareness and attentiveness to divine guidance. It suggests that by fostering a relationship with God and being open to His voice, one can gain profound wisdom and understanding in a short time, surpassing what might be taught by humans over many years.
In practice
A religious leader might use this quote to encourage followers to seek personal revelations.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.
If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
When I left the house of bondage I left everything behind. I wasn't going to keep nothing of Egypt on me, an' so I went to the Lord an' asked him to give me a new name. And he gave me Sojourner because I was to travel up and down the land showing the people their sins and bein' a sign unto them. I told the Lord I wanted two names 'cause everybody else had two, and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people.
You can often help others more by correcting your own faults than theirs. Remember, and you should, because of your own experience, that allowing God to correct your faults is not easy. Be patient with people, wait for God to work with them as He wills.
The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.
The means that make one qualified for enquiry are meditation, yoga, etc. One should gain proficiency in these through graded practice and thus secure a stream of mental modes that is natural and helpful.
Look at the weaknesses of others with compassion, not accusation. It's not what they're not doing or should be doing that's the issue. The issue is your own chosen response to the situation and what you should be doing. If you start to think the problem is "out there," stop yourself. That thought is the problem.
Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.
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