Eknath Easwaran Quotes - Page 3

The spiritual life is a call to action. But it is a call to ... action without any selfish attachment to the results.

Instead of looking at difficulties as deprivations, we can learn to recognize them as opportunities for deepening and widening our love.

Everything beautiful has to be worked for.

The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought.

Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.

By removing that which is petty and self-seeking, we bring forth all that is glorious and mindful of the whole.

International war is the sum total of millions of individual wars, raging in the minds of the people, between what is selfish and what is selfless. To the extent that you and I develop selflessness in our own hearts, to that extent we contribute to peace in our family, community, country, and world.

My grandmother lived in a universe filled with life. It was impossible for her to conceive of any creature - even the smallest insect, let alone a human being - as insignificant. In every leaf, flower, animal, and star she saw an expression of a compassionate universe, whose laws were not competition and survival of the fittest but cooperation, artistry and thrift. . . .

Wisdom may be perennial, but to see its relevance we must see it lived out.

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.

As we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole.

We become in part what our senses take in.

Don't think the purpose of meditation is to go deep into consciousness, wrap a blanket around yourself, and say, 'How cozy! I'm going to curl up in here by myself; let the world burn.' Not at all. We go deep into meditation so that we can reach out further and further to the world outside.

We can all learn to conquer hatred through love -drawing on the power released through the practice of meditation to throw all our weight, all our energy, and all our will on the side of what is patient, forgiving, and selfless in ourselves and others.

At the beginning of every winter people are careful to install storm windows. These extra panes of glass protect their houses against the bitter winds. We do something very similar to protect our minds through the practice of meditation.

Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.

Eventually, meditation will make our mind calm, clear, and as concentrated as a laser which we can focus at will. This capacity of one-pointed attention is the essence of genius. When we have this mastery over attention in everything we do, we have a genius for life.

Whenever you are angry or afraid, nervous or worried or resentful, repeat the mantram until the agitation subsides. The mantram works to steady the mind, and all these emotions are power running against you, which the mantram can harness and put to work for you.

Like Gandhi, like the Buddha, like all great spiritual teachers, Easwaran had no use for beliefs unless they generated actions. Doing, not saying, is what counts.

Mastery does not come from dabbling. We have to be prepared to pay the price. We need to have the sustained enthusiasm that motivates us to give our best.

The earth was our home, she would have said, but no less was it home to the oxen that pulled our plows or the elephants that roamed in the forest and worked for us. They lived with us as partners whose well-being was inseparable from our own.

As the web issues out of the spider, As plants sprout from the earth, As hair grows from the body, even so, The sages say, this universe springs from, The deathless Self (the Supreme Soul), the source of life.