Quotes About Transcendence

First and foremost, we need to acknowledge we are not our ego-based interpretation of ourselves but the Spirit beyond it, and so much more powerful than we even know.

Joy connects us to something larger than ourselves," Beethoven explained, "while happiness is something more personal, something a little more selfish perhaps.

The paradox is that we can only truly love each other when we also love something beyond each other.

The way of soul, we notice, is downward rather than the upward flight of the mystic.

Unless people have a vision of something beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot transcend their self-interest.

But here, now, again, this was more than the body, or the mind, or the personality. It wasn't holy, that was a whole other mess, but it was something that could be touched only here.

This is why we have music, after all. Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us. Finally

Müzik öyle yücedir ki, hiçbir ak?l s?rr?na eremez; müzikten, her ÅŸeye egemen olan ve kimsenin hesab?n? tutamayaca?? bir etki yay?l?r.

Vuestra vida se aleja como el sol poniente, la muerte se acerca como las sombras de la noche.

For a brief moment I felt as if I might die; and just as quickly I knew everything would be all right.

I have smoothed the hem of the robe of Parsifal. Watched Giotto's sheep wander from a fresco. Prayed before holy icons unveiled, surviving time. Held shavings swept from the hut of Geppetto. Unzipped a body bag and beheld the face of my brother. Witnessed the acolyte scatter petals over a dying poet. I saw the smoke of incense form the shape of my days. I saw my love return to God. I saw things as they are.

I stared up at the plaster ceiling as I had done as a child. It seemed to me that the vibrating patterns overhead were sliding into place. The mandala of my life.

Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold

Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds. The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask.

Remember we are mortal but poetry is not.

The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now.

It was one of the most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt my skin had become transparent. I wasn't occupying space anymore so much as melting into it. What was around me was also inside me, and I had only to look into myself in order to see the world.

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

The longer I listened, the harder I found it to leave. To get inside that music: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear.

Smith organizes her own book, The Power of Meaning, around four themes that show up in this summary: Belonging: connecting to and bonding with other people Purpose: finding something worthwhile Storytelling: narratives that bring order to life Transcendence: mystical experiences of self-loss

The first is the art of mind-stilling, of emptying consciousness of every thought and form whatsoever. This is mysticism or Yoga.

It does not lie within man's power to gain more than a glimpse of this diviner life.

The fruit of such meditations comes in the form of brief glimpses of the soul's flower-like beauty.

There comes a stage, whether in meditation or in the ordinary daily experience of life, at which he has to cross over from doing, trying, and managing things by his own self alone and when he can let go and open himself to the higher force--when he can submit his ego to its ordinances, its commands, or to its whispers.