Hermann Hesse Quotes

Being is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

That is the ego which rises and sinks periodically. But you exist always. That which lies beyond the ego is consciousness - the Self.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

The state of self-realization, as we call it, is not attaining something new or reaching some goal which is far away, but simply being that which you always are and which you always have been.

You can find God if you will only seek - by obeying divine laws, by loving people, by relinquishing self-will, attachments, negative thoughts and feelings. And when you find God it will be in stillness. You will find God within.

How do we awaken to this true Self? By going within and putting our attention on the silent presence in our heart - the silent witness that is detached from sensory experience and at the same time enjoys that experience in complete freedom.

You are awareness. Awareness is another name for you. Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or cultivate it. All that you have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is of the not-Self. If one gives up being aware of them then pure awareness alone remains, and that is the Self.

Our identification with the mind and body is the chief reason for our failure to know our self as we truly are.

Realize your true nature. That is all there is to do. Know yourself as you are - infinite Spirit. That is practical religion. Everything else is impractical, for everything else will perish.

To one who reads the spirit of the Gita, it teaches the secret of nonviolence, the secret of realizing self through the physical body.

Only when all images of Earth are hushed and the clamor of the senses be stilled, and the soul has passed beyond thought of self, can the eternal wisdom be revealed to the mystic who seeks that highest communion with the unseen.

The mystical journey drives us into ourselves, to a sacred flame at our center.

The true purpose of yoga is to discover that aspect of your being that can never be lost.

Do not imagine that an integral being has the ambition of enlightening the unaware or raising worldly people to the divine realm. To her, there is no self and other, and hence no one to be raised; no heaven and hell, and hence no destination.

Whatever be the means adopted, you must at last return to the Self, so why not abide as the Self here and now?

This little separate self must die. Then we shall find that we are in the Real, and that Real is God, and He is our own true nature, and He is always in us and with us. Let us live in Him and stand in Him. It is the only joyful state of existence. Life on the plane of the Spirit is the only life, and let us all try to attain to this realization.

I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature.

When you understand that you are your soul, then you will experience Life as an expression of the soul.

Get away from all books and forms and let your soul see its Self. "We are deluded and maddened by books", Shri Krishna declares.

I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences. I am not the content of my life. I am Life. I am the space in which all things happen. I am consciousness. I am the Now. I Am.

To study the Way is to study the Self. To study the Self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe. To be enlightened by all things of the universe is to cast off the body and mind of the self as well as those of others. Even the traces of enlightenment are wiped out, and life with traceless enlightenment goes on forever and ever

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.

There is no reaching the Self. If Self were to be reached, it would mean that the Self is not here and now but that it is yet to be obtained. What is got afresh will also be lost. So it will be impermanent. What is not permanent is not worth striving for. So I say the Self is not reached. You are the Self; you are already That.

Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.

Awakening to who we really are is at the heart of yoga. . . .Yoga offers a path to this underlying field of being, which is the source of creativity, fulfillment, and abundance.