Presence

Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round everything, and, as Pindar says, 'searches the bowels of the earth', and seeks by conjecture to sound the minds of his neighbours, but fails to perceive that it is enough to abide with the Divinity that is within himself and to do Him genuine service.

Do nothing evil, neither in the presence of others, nor privately; But above all things respect yourself. In the next place, observe justice in your actions and in your words. And do not accustom yourself to behave yourself in any thing without rule, and without reason.

Every human being has in the depths of his consciousness heard the question "Am I not your Lord?" and answered "Yes" to it.

I showed myself to him just now as Tao appeared before time was. I was to him as a great blank, existing of itself. He knew not who I was. His face fell. He became confused. And so he fled.

And therefore the eternal Unity brings itself by its effluence and separation into nature, that it may have an object, in which it may manifest itself, and that it may love something, and be again be loved by something, that so there may be a perceiving, or sensible working and will.

You must understand, in the spiritual fire of the will, the true desirous soul out of the eternal ground; and in the power and virtue of the light, the true understanding spirit, in which the Unity of God dwells and is manifest, as our Lord Christ says, The kingdom of God is within you; and Paul says, You are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who dwells in you; this is the place of the divine inhabiting and revelation.

The first is the going upwards of the fiery will; the second is the going downwards, or sinking of the watery spirit, viz. the meekness; and the third is the going out forwards of the oily spirit, in the midst, in the center of the fiery spirit of the will ; which oily spirit is the ens of the Unity of God, which is become a substance in the desire of nature; yet all is but spirit and power: but so it appears in the figure of the manifestation, not as if there were any severing or division, but it appears so in the manifestation.

Paradise is for those who intend to commit some sin and then remember that My eye is upon them and forbear.

On the Seven Minor Planes of the Great Spiritual Plane exist Beings of whom we may speak as Angels; Archangels; Demi-Gods.

But never begin to set your hand to any work, until you have first prayed the gods to accomplish what you are going to begin. When you have made this habit familiar to you, You will know the constitution of the Immortal Gods and of men. Even how far the different beings extend, and what contains and binds them together.

The eternal manifestation of the divine light is called the kingdom of heaven, and the habitation of the holy angels and souls.

In the place of this world, heaven and hell are present everywhere, but according to the inward ground. Inwardly, the divine working is manifest in God's children; but in the wicked, the working of the painful darkness.

The first group represents the faithful who keep aloof from the world altogether and the last group the infidels who care only for this world and nothing for the next. The two intermediate classes are those who preserve their faith, but entangle themselves more or less with the vanities of things present.

Whenever you are obliged by circumstances to be in a way troubled, quickly return to yourself, and do not, more than you are obliged, fall out of step; for you will ​be more master of the measure by continually returning to it.

Every sinner thus carries with him into the world beyond death the instruments of his own punishment; and the Koran says truly, "Verily you shall see hell; you shall see it with the eye of certainty," and "hell surrounds the unbelievers." It does not say "will surround them," for it is round them even now.

He who sees what is now has seen all things, whatsoever came to pass from everlasting and whatsoever shall be unto unlimited time. For all things are of one kin and of one kind.

Habituate yourself not to be inattentive to what another has to say and, so far as possible, be in the mind of the speaker. What does not benefit the hive is no benefit to the bee.

Wipe away the impress of imagination. Stay the impulse which is drawing you. Define the time which is present. Recognize what is happening to yourself or another. Divide and separate the event into its causal and material aspects. Dwell in thought upon your last hour. Leave the wrong done by another where the wrong arose.

Direct your thought to what is being said. Let your mind gain an entrance into what is occurring and who is producing it.

Perfection of character possesses this: to live each day as if the last, to be neither feverish nor apathetic, and not to act a part.

Till a man is thoroughly convinced of the fact that he is always under God's observation it is impossible for him to act rightly.

One vital spirit is distributed in irrational creatures: one mind spirit is divided in rational creatures; just as one element earth is in all earthy things and we see by one light and breathe one atmosphere, all that have sight and vital spirit.

Things stand outside our doors, themselves by themselves, neither knowing nor reporting anything about themselves. What then does report about them? The governing self.

He who rises in the morning with only God in his mind, God shall look after him, both in this world and the next.

But the delight of knowledge still falls short of the delight of vision, just as our pleasure in thinking of those we love is much less than the pleasure afforded by the actual sight of them.

He who is busy with himself now will be busy with himself then, and he who is occupied with God now will be occupied with Him then.

The third test is that the remembrance of God should always remain fresh in a man's heart without effort, for what a man loves he constantly remembers, and if his love is perfect he never forgets it.

It is in your power to secure at once all the objects which you dream of reaching by a roundabout path, if you will be fair to yourself: that is, if you will leave all the past behind, commit the future to Providence, and direct the present, and that alone, to Holiness and Justice. Holiness, to love your dispensation for Nature brought it to you and you to it; Justice, freely and without circumlocution both to speak the truth and to do the things that are according to law and according to worth. And be not hampered by another's evil, his judgement, or his words, much less by the sensation of the flesh that has formed itself about you- let the part affected look to itself.

Whenever you feel something hard to bear, you have forgotten (a) that all comes to pass according to the Nature of the Whole, (b) that the wrong is not your own but another's, further (c) that all that is coming to pass always did, always will, and does now everywhere thus come to pass, (d) the great kinship of man with all mankind, for the bond of kind is not blood nor the seed of life, but mind. You have forgotten, moreover, (e) that every individual's mind is of God and has flowed from that other world, (f) that nothing is a man's own, but even his child, his body, and his vital spirit itself have come from that other world, (g) that all is judgement, (h) that every man lives only the present life and this is what he is losing.

Jesus said, "The kingdom is like a man who had a hidden treasure in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know (about the treasure). He inherited the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished."

The check came in the shape of mysticism. It corrected the balance. It showed that Judaism has a place not only for Reason but for Love too. It showed that the ideal life of the Jew was, not a life of outward harmony with rules and prescriptions, but a life of inward attachment to a Divine Life which is immanent everywhere, and that the crown and consummation of all effort consists in finding a direct way to the actual presence of God.

He has the immediate vision; he hears the still small voice speaking clearly to him in the silence of his soul.

They seem to have lived on the borderland of an unusual ecstasy, experiencing extraordinary invasions of the Divine, hearing mystic sounds and seeing mystic visions which, to them, were the direct and immediate revelations of the deepest and most sacred truths.

When remembrance stands on guard at the portal of the spirit, watchfulness comes, and nevermore departs.

My child, thou shalt remember both night and day him that speaketh unto thee the Word of God; thou shalt honour him as thou dost the Lord, for where the teaching of the Lord is given, there is the Lord.

The Old Testament shines forth with sublime examples of men whose communion with God was a thing of intensest reality to them, and whose conviction of the 'nearness' of the Divine was beyond the slightest doubt.

'Why, O master, hast thou dismounted from thy ass?' asked the disciple. 'Is it possible,' replied he, 'that I will ride upon my ass at the moment when thou art expounding the mysteries of the Merkabah, and the Shechinah is with us, and the ministering angels are accompanying us?'

He felt instinctively that the Merkabah typified the human longing for the sight of the Divine Presence and companionship with it.

The remark that 'the Shechinah is with us and the ministering angels are accompanying us' emphasises two salient features of Rabbinic mysticism.

The angel is a kind of representative of the Deity among mortals. It is a sort of God in action. God is very near man and not transcendent.

The world impregnated with traces and symptoms of a Divine Life.

This air is the abode of incorporeal souls, since it seemed good to the Creator of the universe to fill all parts of the world with living creatures.

The truth is that God was in many senses brought very near, and the angel was but an aspect of this 'nearness.' God was immanent as well as transcendent, and the angel was a sort of emanation of the Divine, an off-shoot of Deity, holding intimate converse with the affairs of the world.

The Rabbis often materialised the Shechinah and gave strongly definite personality to their 'angels'.

Angels are emanations of the Divine working here below. Man is in a double sense made by them. It was they who had a hand in his creation. It is they who fill his environment, and make him realise that he is ever in the grip of a Presence from which there is no escaping.

'Shechinah' comes from shachan = to dwell. The whole edifice of thought about the Shechinah is based upon such passages in the Old Testament as "And let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them" (Exodus, xxv. 8). "Defile ye not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I dwell: for I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel" (Numbers, xxxv. 34). "And I will set my tabernacle among you and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and ye shall be my people" (Leviticus, xxvi. 11, 12)

The Rabbi, however, who stayed on and succeeded in eliciting from the Shechinah a promise that the ministering angels should henceforth cease from troubling him, is the type of the mystic who feels the mental and physical elation, the joy, the rapture, the triumph consequent upon the conviction of his having, at last, reached the goal of his quest - the sight, sound and touch of the Ultimate Reality.

Writers on mysticism, no matter to what school of religious thought they may happen to belong, familiarise us with the great fact that the mystic, by reason of the high levels of spiritual intensity on which his life is lived, experiences certain physical sensations which enable him to see or to hear something of the mystery of the Divine Presence.

His whole life is, as it were, a response to it, infected with it, absorbed in it.

One of the distinguishing features of the mystical temperament is the contrast in the effects which this sudden invasion of a Divine Presence had upon the objects of the visitation. The two Rabbis who left the synagogue did so, most probably, as the result of the fearful weakening and depressing effect of the vision. The Rabbi, however, who stayed on and succeeded in eliciting from the Shechinah a promise that the ministering angels should henceforth cease from troubling him, is the type of the mystic who feels the mental and physical elation, the joy, the rapture, the triumph consequent upon the conviction of his having, at last, reached the goal of his quest - the sight, sound and touch of the Ultimate Reality.

Man, having the privilege to behold everywhere the Divine image - the world being an embodiment of God - can, if he will, make his way to the Invisible Author of all; can have union with the Unseen.