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
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.
Interpretation
Just because you cannot perceive something does not mean it does not exist.
This quote by Ramakrishna highlights the idea that the absence of sensory evidence does not equate to the absence of existence. Just as stars are still present in the sky even when they are not visible during the day, the divine may also exist beyond our current understanding or perception, especially when clouded by ignorance. It encourages a deeper exploration of faith and existence beyond immediate observation.
In practice
In a discussion about belief and spirituality, one could use this quote to illustrate the idea that faith can exist without visible proof.
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.
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.
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.
We're setting up mechanisms where we can kill human beings with drones and missiles where you're sitting at a console and pressing the button. We never have to hear their whimpering, or hear them begging for their mother, or dying in horrible realities around us. I don't know if that's necessarily such a good thing.
People know about the Klan and the overt racism, but the killing of one's soul little by little, day after day, is a lot worse than someone coming in your house and lynching you.
A true symbol appears only when there is a need to express what thought cannot think or what is only divined or felt.
How many times have you tried to solve “the problem”? you’ll be trying to solve it not just until you die but for many more lifetimes. Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world.
It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.
I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.
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