Quotes About Transcendence

I think I want to talk about life from the point of view of death.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

The world is set up - as foreign as that can be to some people who are very materialistic - but there is a force in this world, once we step into it, that opens doors for us, that gives us a sense of purpose and the greatest life there is, in my view.

In no time at all, Beatrix appeared. She was wearing a white dress made of thin, flowing layers, the bodice wrapped intricately over the curves of her breasts. The translucence of her chest and upper arms gave her the look of emerging from the white silk.

None can contain the magnificence of a wave kissing sand or the perfect spiral of a shell drying translucent in the sun or the fire of morning rising over endless water.

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,

There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

The sound of rain outlives us. I listen, someone is whispering.

The stars report a vast consequence our human moment joins.

Love has come and it flows like blood beneath my skin, through my veins. It has emptied me of my self and filled me with the Beloved. The Beloved has penetrated every cell of my body. Of myself there remains only a name, everything else is Him. (Rumi)

The bond between the lover and the Beloved is the strongest link with the beyond, and it is through this link that grace can flow into the world. (p. 42)

The Sufi is interested in neither this world nor the next, in neither heaven nor hell. He will pay any price to reach Reality in this life. The price is that "everything has to go," and like any mental belief, the values of good and bad can be a limitation. Even the desire to renounce must be left behind. One Sufi poet wrote: "On the hat of poverty three renouncements are inscribed: 'Quit this world, quit the next world, quit quitting.

Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.

The whole secret may be summarized in these four words: "Inflame thyself in praying." —ALEISTER CROWLEY38

Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst out in laughter.

When the mind rests open, blank, Utterly without the apprehension of appearing objects, This is the moment of the universal ground.

All nature ... is a respiration Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter Will inhale it into his bosom again, So that nothing but God alone will remain.

This is to be mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality.

No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for the existence of a snow-flake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.

The world around me fades.

of good confronting evil, of light overcoming darkness, of love transcending hate." He tilted his head. "Isn't that where all faith begins?

I guess being dead gives you a whole different perspective on life.

You are in the world, but not to be tied to the world.

Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass