Monday, February 18, 2013

Immersed Always in Divine Love

If you fill an earthen vessel with water and set it apart on a shelf, the water in it will dry up in a few days; but if you place the same vessel immersed in water, it will remain filled as long as it is kept there. Even so is the case of your love for God. Fill and enrich your bosom with the love of God for a time and then employ yourself in other affairs, forgetting God all the while, and then you are sure to find within a short time that your heart has become poor and vacant and devoid of that precious love. But if you keep your heart immersed always in the ocean of divine love, your heart is sure to remain ever full to overflowing with the water of the divine love.

— Sri Ramakrishna (born February 18, 1836)

In Harmony with the Great Combatant

I now clearly saw the progress of the Invisible, and suddenly I knew what my duty was to be: to work in harmony together with that Combatant; to transmute even I, in my own small capacity, matter into spirit, for only then might I try to reach the highest endeavor of man—a harmony with the universe.

I felt deeply and I was freed. I did not change the world—this I could not do—but I changed the vision with which I looked out upon the world. And since then, I have struggled—at first consciously and with anguish, then bit by bit unconsciously and without tiring—not to do anything which might find itself in disharmony with the rhythm of the Great Combatant. Since then I have felt ashamed to commit any vulgar act, to lie, to be overcome by fears, because I know that I also have a great responsibility in the progress of the world. I work and think now with certainty, for I know that my contribution, because it follows the profound depths of the universe, will not go lost. Even I, a mortal, may work with One who is immortal, and my spirit—as much as possible—may become more and more immortal. This harmony, which is not at all passive, but an unceasing and renewing reconciliation and co-operation with antithetical powers, has remained for me my freedom and my redemption.

— Nikos Kazantzakis (born February 18, 1883)