“The trick is to cultivate “double vision” … A sense of metaphor, of translation - of two worlds interpenetrating - must be maintained. But this is also the essential movement of the imagination. We see through the literal world to the shape-shifting Otherworld behind.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“The paradox is that we can only truly love each other when we also love something beyond each other.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“Your body-mind is like a cup made of clay. If it is filled with feelings -- negative, positive, dark, light sweet, sour-- close your eyes and drink it. Your soul can drink even poison as though it’s nectar. Everything is blissful at soul level.”
“A bird is inside a moving car. He is flapping his wings and thinking that car is moving because of him. That is your life: Bird is your soul, car is your body-mind. You say, “There is no satisfaction in the journey.” Guru says, “Detach from the car.” But you panic as soon as you hear the word “detach”. It only means, fly above the car, not inside it.”
“The more we realize our selves, the less they seem to be our selves, as if the world-soul merely wishes to reflect itself through our eyes. The less self-important we are, the more important we are as selves, with a unique perspective on the cosmos.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“Death is a portal into that greater reality that can already be glimpsed in this world as an imaginative experience of the Otherworld.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“Death is not the opposite of life but of birth - life is a continuous realm out of which we are born; that (as Plato says) we can dimly remember during our existence; and to which we return when we die - to that totality of life compared to which mortal existence seems but a dreamlike fragment.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“Each of us is an individual manifestation of the collective world-soul … we are also and paradoxically contained by the world-soul, like droplets in the ocean.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“Soul is what turns ordinary events into experiences; what imparts to the passing moment depth, connection, and resonance … The effect is unmistakable: an experience of stillness in our heads and, in our hearts, a fullness … Soul is what is transmitted and received in the experience that we call love.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul
“However much we wish the soul’s path to be straight, upward, and ascending, it is more likely to be meandering, full of regressions, downward turns, and backward glances.”
Source: The Secret Tradition of the Soul