BEING / ESSENCE / SOUL

Related States & Conditions | Syntonic | Dystonic

The Soul is made of consciousness and mind; it is made of life and vision. It is made of the earth and the waters; it is made of air and space. It is made of light and darkness; it is made of desire and peace. It is made of anger and love; it is made of virtue and vice. It is made of all that is near; it is made of all that is afar. It is made of all.
Upanishads
c. 1400-c. 800 BCE, Hindu Sacred Text

As the moon retaineth her nature, though darkness spread itself before her face as a curtain, so the Soul remaineth perfect even in the bosom of a fool.
Akhenaton
c. 1385-c. 1355 BCE, Khemetic (Egyptian) Pharoah

You should know that the essential Bodhi is wondrous and bright, being neither cause nor condition, neither self as such nor not self as such, neither unreality nor not unreality, for it is beyond all forms and is identical with all things. How can you now think of it and use frivolous terminology of the world to express it? This is like trying to catch or touch the void with your hand; you will only tire yourself, for how can you catch the void?
Buddha
c. 563-483 BCE, Indian Prince, Mystic, Founder of Buddhism
Surangama Sutra , Upasaka Lu K'uan Yu (Charles Luk), tr., 1966

You could never arrive at the limits of the soul, no matter how many roads you traveled, so deep is its mystery.
Heraclitus
c. 540-c. 480 BCE, Greek Philosopher

The sphere of the soul maintains its perfect form when it is not extended toward any object, or shrinking in on itself, or dispersed or sunk down, but only when it is bathed in light, the light in which it sees the truth, both in all things and in itself.
Marcus Aurelius
121-180, Roman Emperor, Stoic Philosopher
The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius , Mark Forstater, tr., 2000

As our body is a part of the universe, so also our soul is a part of the Soul of the universe … Souls are responsive to one another because they all come from the same soul.
Plotinus
205-270, Roman Philosopher
Enneads

Let each and every one of you turn the light inwards and not try to memorize my words … The one thing essential now is to recollect your mind to attain the fundamental, the very root of your being. Having arrived at the root, you need have no worry about the accidentals.
Guishan Lingyou
771-854, Chinese Chan Master, Guiyang School Founder
in The Golden Age of Zen , John Chwan-Hwa Wu, ed.

It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. He is wise who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman.
Shankara
788-822, Indian Philosopher, Guru, Poet
Viveka-Chudamani

I explain to you matters
Pertaining to enlightenment,
But don't try to keep
Your mind on them.
Just turn to the ocean
Of your own essence
And develop practical accord with its nature.
Yangshan Huiji
803-887, Chinese Chan Master, Guiyang School Founder

When you suddenly
Realize the source of mind,
You open a box of jewels.
Honorable on earth and in the heavens,
You are aloof even
From the joy of meditation.
The essence containing all flavors
Is the supreme delicacy,
Worth more than ten thousand
Ounces of pure gold.
Fenyang Shanzhao
947-1024, Chinese Chan Master

Your deep soul hides itself from consciousness. So you need to increase aloneness, elevation of thinking, penetration of thought, liberation of mind – until finally your soul reveals itself to you, spangling a few sparkles of her lights.
Kabbalah
Medieval Jewish Esoteric Text
The Essential Kabbalah , Daniel Chanan Matt, ed., 1996

The soul enjoys the body in its pleasures and takes over to heal it in its illnesses.
Marsilio Ficino
1433-1499, Italian Philosopher

The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe.
Gottfried Leibniz
1646-1716, German Philosopher
The Monadology

The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn toward this ME, the center and moving power of our sentiments and ideas.
Germaine de Stael
1766-1817, French-Swiss Writer, Critic

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
Victor Hugo
1802-1885, French Poet, Novelist, Dramatist, Politician

For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceedeth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist, Philosopher
Self-Reliance

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal;
dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807-1882, American Poet, Writer

The seat of a soul is not inside a person or outside a person but the very place they overlap and meet with the world.
Gerard de Nerval
1808-1855, French Poet, Writer

There is no short cut, no patent tram-road, to wisdom: After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by those of old times.
George Eliot
1819-1880, English Writer, Poet

Save his own soul he hath no star
And sinks, except his own soul guide.
Algernon Swinburne
1837-1909, English Poet, Critic, Dramatist

To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, Irish Poet, Dramatist, Critic, Wit
De Profundis

I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet – a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearless force of non-human things.
Bertrand Russell
1872-1970, English Philosopher, Mathematician, Essayist, Social Reformer, 1951 Nobel Laureate
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell , Vol. I, 1884-1914, Nicholas Griffin, ed.

It is only when life is overwrought with the tyranny of doing that we miss the joy of being; and it is only the consciousness of being that makes us capable of any worthy action.
Holbrook Jackson
1874-1948, English Writer, Editor, Essayist
Southward Ho! And Other Essays

Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions , of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly , existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.
Rainier Marie Rilke
1875-1926, Czech-Austrian Poet

We mostly spend (our scattered lives) conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual – even on the religious – plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except as far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life.
Evelyn Underhill
1875-1941, English Writer, Poet
The Spiritual Life , 1937

We can never finally know. I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.
Carl Jung
1875-1961, Swiss Psychologist, Theorist

No one can give a definition of the soul. But we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than ourselves, something that stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the world of goodness, truth, and beauty. The soul is a burning desire to breathe in this world of light and never to lose it – to remain children of light.
Albert Schweitzer
1875-1965, German Theologian, Philosopher, Musician, Physician, Missionary, 1952 Nobel Laureate
Reverence for Life: The Words of Albert Schweitzer , Harold Robles, ed., 1993

Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.
Ramana Maharshi
1879-1950, Indian Yogi
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi

Just what we really are matters more than what other people think of us.
Jawaharlal Nehru
1889-1964, Indian Statesman, 1st Prime Minister of India

It is with the soul that we grasp the essence of another human being, not with the mind, not even with the heart.
Henry Miller
1891-1980, American Writer
The Books in My Life

Man has falsely identified with the pseudo-soul or ego. When he transfers his sense of identity to his true being, the immortal Soul, he discovers that all pain is unreal. He no longer can even imagine the state of suffering.
Paramahansa Yogananda
1893-1952, Indian Guru, Writer
Sayings of Paramahansa Yogananda

As soon as we start looking through the outer and visible to the inner and invisible and trying to see how form and meaning relate, most of the old body/soul dichotomy vanishes. The soul then becomes the body's meaning, and the body the expression of the soul.
Karlfried Graf Durckheim
1896-, German Psychologist, Philosopher
The Call for the Master , Vincent Nash, tr., 1989

The life force and the mind are operating, but the mind will tempt you to believe that it is "you". Therefore, understand always that you are the timeless, spaceless witness. And even if the mind tells you that you are the one who is acting, don't believe the mind. Always keep your identity separate from that which is doing the working, thinking and talking. That which has happened – that is, the apparatus which is functioning – has come upon your original essence, but you are not that apparatus.
Nisargadatta
1897-1981, Indian Shopkeeper, Vedanta Teacher
Prior to Consciousness: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Jean Dunn, ed., 1990

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
Abraham Heschel
1907-1972, Polish/American Theologian, Rabbi, Writer

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by mid-life it is overgrown … But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.
Saul Bellow
1915-, Canadian/American Writer, 1976 Nobel Laureate

It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate – an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence – that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse. Soul appears as a factor independent of the events in which we are immersed. Though I cannot identify soul with anything else, I also can never grasp it by itself apart from other things, perhaps because it is like a reflection in a flowing mirror, or like the moon which mediates only borrowed light. But just this peculiar and paradoxical intervening variable gives one the sense of having or being a soul. However intangible and indefinable it is, soul carries highest importance in hierarchies of human values, frequently being identified with the principle of life and even of divinity.
James Hillman
1926-, American Writer
Re-Visioning Psychology , 1975

If I see one dilemma with Western man, it's that he can't accept how beautiful he is. He can't accept that he is pure light, that he's pure love, that he's pure consciousness, that he's divine.
Ram Dass
1931-, American Psychologist, Teacher, Writer
in Esquire , 1972

There is nothing to do but be.
Stephen Levine
1937-, American Writer, Counselor

Soulfulness … Its goal is not to make life problem-free, but to give ordinary life depth and value.
Thomas Moore
1940-, American Psychologist, Writer
Care of the Soul , 1992

The real you is a nonlocal field of information that is trapped in space and time by the body and mind. Your soul, the thinker of thoughts, finds expression through the mind and body, but when body and brain are destroyed, nothing happens to the real you. The unconditional spirit is not energy or matter, it is in the silent spaces between our thoughts.
Deepak Chopra
1947-, Indian/American Physician, Writer
Journey Into Healing: Awakening the Wisdom Within You , 1994

When you get in touch with the part of yourself that is eternal and nonchanging, you have true knowledge of your own immortality, and fear melts away like snow in the summer breeze.
Ibid.

When the energy of the soul is recognized, acknowledged, and valued, it begins to infuse the life of the personality. When the personality comes fully to serve the energy of its soul, that is authentic empowerment. This is the goal of the evolutionary process in which we are involved and the reason for our being. Every experience that you have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of your personality with your soul. Every circumstance and situation gives you the opportunity to choose this path, to allow your soul to shine through you, to bring into the physical world through you its unending and unfathomable reverence for and love of Life.
Gary Zukav
American Writer
The Seat of the Soul , 1990

You must begin wherever you are.
Jack Boland
1924-1992, American Unity Cleric

Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929-1968, African-American Civil Rights Leader, Baptist Cleric, 1964 Nobel Laureate

You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
Beverly Sills
1929-, American Opera Singer

This instant is a new beginning for all. If you really jump into a now-moment you will be completely renewed.
Tolbert McCarroll
1931-, American Writer
Notes from the Song of Life , 1977

But the greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel – and the anxiety is still vivid to me – that I might easily have failed before I began.
Vidia Naipaul
1932-, Indian-Trinidadian/British Writer, 2001 Nobel Laureate

You must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.
Richard Bach
1936-, American Writer
Jonathan Livingston Seagull , 1973

Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.
Vaclav Havel
1936-, Czech President, Poet, Dramatist

It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.
August Wilson
1945-, African-American Dramatist

No first step can be really great; it must of necessity possess more of prophecy than of achievement; nevertheless, it is by the first step that a man marks the value, not only of his cause, but of himself.
- Katherine Cecil Thurston

Don't wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater.
- Mary Manin Morrissey

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Wisdom for The Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, © 2004