Quotes about Essence

So much of the stress you hold and the ways you keep yourself stuck have to do with how far you've traveled from your original self. You can release that tension by identifying who's actually there under all those layers and why that pure essence is really perfect as it is. And when you let go of that stress... when you can stop blaming yourself for being who you are, it frees up an enormous amount of energy to move forward in life.

Our soul, our true self, is the most mysterious, essential, and magical dimension of our being.  In fact, it is not a separate reality, as traditional Western thought views it, but the cohesive force that unites our body, heart, and mind.  It is not a ghost trapped somehow in the physical machinery of our body but the very essence of our being.

Each soul is unique, and we are called upon to break out of the minimum security prison of conformity and mediocrity to experience our soul's true magic and power.  Like a plant it needs to be nurtured to grow and blossom, and to be freed from the entangling, obscuring weeds that tend to take over.  The soul is an artist.  Its nature is to create, and its natural expression is in the sacred architypical roles of the dancer, the singer, the actor and the healer.  Life is a caberet, and our challenge is to act out our essential self on the stage for the world.

Though the soul is not a thing, it is our beingness, that which gives us being.  So its presence and absence are visible.  Its presence manifests in being awake, attentive, energetic, alive.  It is the spark of life.  It is absent or dampened when we lack vitality, elan, energy.  It is the true self we are seeking in all our explorations, and yet it is not somewhere "out there" but right here now, underneath the false roles we're always casting ourselves in.

Freeing the soul, freeing ourselves to be soulful, means empowering ourselves to really see what's going on in ourselves, in others, in our lives.  This seeing is not the ordinary sort of looking we're habituated to.  Looking operates on the surface; seeing probes beneath to discern the essence, the motion, the energy.  Looking is just a matter of regarding things things according to our preconceived, static ideas.  But as the new physics and biology have clearly shown, our surface impression of the nature of reality as static naively misses the truth of the constant motion and infinite space that truly constitute reality.

Carlos Castenada in "A Separate Reality", gives an arresting example of the difference between seeing and looking.  Don Juan describes the death of his son who was crushed by rocks on a highway.  "The workers stood around looking at his mangled body.  I stood there too, but I did not look.  I shifted my eyes so I would see his personal life disintegrating, expanding uncontrollably beyond its limits, like a fog of crystals, because that's the way life and death mix and expand.  Had I looked at him I would have watched him becoming immobile and I would have felt a cry inside of me, because never again would I look at his fine figure pacing the earth.  I saw his death instead, and there was no sadness, no feeling.  His death was equal to everything else."  Later he tell Carlos that seeing is "hard work."

Seeing implies detachment.  Looking implies attachment.  Looking is with the eyes.  Seeing is with the whole being.  Looking at myself in the mirror, I think that my nose is crooked and too big, my eyes too small, my hair too fine, my hips too wide.  I judge.  I assess myself by some external criteria that have by now become part and parcel of how I look at people.  But if I stare into my left eye in the mirror I see only a still, perfect little doll-like figure of myself in the midst of a deep pool of subtly changing reflections, probably an image much closer to the truth.  It is when I can see myself with interpretation that the magic of being, the pure wonder of existing is revealed...

... LIfe is sacred.  Life is art.  Life is sacred art.  The art of sacred living means being a holy actor, acting from the soul rather than the ego.  The soul is out of space and time and hence always available, an ever-present potential of our being.  It is up to each of us to celebrate and actualize our being, and to turn each meal, conversation, outfit, letter, and so on, into art.  Every mundane activity is an opportunity for full, authentic self-exploration.  The soul is our artistic self, our capacity for transforming every dimension of our lives into art and theater.



 

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.

For the quantum theorists, the fact that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts underpins all reality. For everything in life, there is more to it than meets the eye. The real essence, and the real meaning, is deep within, which in effect often means both inside and outside the object we are observing.

"I'll fuck anything that moves!"

"Now it's dark..."

"Don't toast to my health, toast to my fuck!"

In order to understand what is truly essential in another person that ought to be loved in him or her, one has to be able to dismiss authoritatively and wisely all that that person himself or herself in delusion IMAGINES to be essential to him or her. As rare as any form of sobriety may be in politics or society, it is of course rarest of all in love-relations. "Love" that has no such counterforce against the delusions of Self and World will merely get drawn into the pathos of the unenlightened, by retail methods if not by wholesale. Sharing in others' pathos is not at all the same thing as love; it is merely one finite and obtuse psyche getting digested into the churning life of another finite and obtuse psyche.

" The essence of life is to honour all paths and all people. For to embrace diversity is to celebrate the beauty of truth and the mystic power of humanity."

In essence all experiences can only be an unconscious projection from the Self or mindbody package, of the Divine. Not the Divine itself, simply triggered by touching on the Divine.

That which is through all experience cannot be affected by anything. It is only that, which is left when experience is gone.

Now there is no experiencer, nor any experience to be experienced.

Freedom itself.

"Who is to judge one flower to be a weed and another to be a delight? The weed was a delight unto itself before judgment arrived. Now it is rejected, deprived of love and must spread to be noticed, to make its call heard. It is all one movement of life, regardless if it be a thunderstorm or an august night. To acknowledge my brother's sovereignty, to allow him the right to be however he wishes to be, it to set him free. So, the answer to the question, how to embrace my adversary, is always: embrace what you feel. This brings us back to our own attitude. If it is hate we feel or hate's milder form, which is dislike, then we embrace this emotion all the same--and without judgment, If the person's conduct is so unpleasant that his presence becomes intolerable we can remove ourself. It this is not possible, then we take action not in the form of attack but rather as a mother corrects a misbehaving child. This can be done without any judgment. The essence of this learning is this: we only experience the person or situation as unlovable because polarities were singled out and judged. We see but ourself in the other person, hence judging him is judging ourself. We would never experience an unlovable person or condition if we embraced every person or condition and welcomed them without judgment."

Names are distractions, seek to know essence.

As the years pass, all we need to achieve is there, in the beginning, ready to be rediscovered.

The deepest secret, the greatest prize and the  holiest of grails is contained there, where it has always been,

within our very existence, the essence of our being, our soul, our heart, our precious breath, this precious moment.

author: Suz.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

As my moon, my sun began to rise
I burned the golden herb of my wondrous mountain-
The six-jointed juniper-
Fumigating myself.
And carefully refreshing myself with it's aroma,
I then mounted my steed and donned my cloak.

And now I am galloping with my shoulder blades,
Nodding my head with the bird feathers,
Opening and closing the all-seeing eyes,
And dropping my head in a bow.
And so I come to that which has a name,
And so I come to this that has become known.

As you learn to leave alone the activity of unconsciously trying to be the mindbody that you think that you are - the mindbody that this "you" is currently flowing through - and you learn to move as this one that you truly are - this "you" of you; the very heart of existence - steadily, consciously and momentarily, the continuity of the ever deepening of this innermost as it keeps on entering its manifestation, through this mindbody that you find yourself flowing through, allows you to simply bubble in the sheer joy, pleasure, peace, delightfulness and stillness that this "you" of you is.

Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of still and alert attention in human beings' perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves.  Until this happens, however, most humans see only the outer forms, unaware of the inner essence, just as they are unaware of their own essence and identify only with their own physical and psychological form.

Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.  When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you.  Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.  This is what great artists sense and succeed in conveying in their art.  Van Gogh didn't say: "That's just an old chair."  He looked, and looked, and looked.  He sensed the Beingness of the chair.  Then he sat in front of the canvas and took up the brush.  The chair itself would have sold for the equivalent of a few dollars.  The painting of that same chair today would fetch in excess of $25 million.

The essence of pleasure is spontaneity.

Modern science, e.g. Darwinism etc., has a profound and nearly (to itself) unutterable metaphysical fallacy in terms of which it tries to think:  all law is to it inherently extrinsic, there is no kind of intrinsic or essential or "internal" lawfulness as such (and therefore there is no demand, no place and no tolerance for attempts to think essentially, intrinsically, in a cultured and self-reflective or profoundly critical/a-priori way).  Extrinsicalism has made both "science" and "capitalism" into exoteric and pedestrian pursuits in which one not only does not have to be any kind of extraordinary genius, but it may well be a preeminent advantage to be a mediocrity, to have as little culture and depth and critical strategy as possible.

Our intuition is not easily fooled -- essence speaks to essence without words.

Learn to get in touch with the innermost essence of your being. This true essence is beyond the ego. It is fearless; it is free; it is immune to criticism; it does not fear any challenge. It is beneath no one, superior to no one, and full of magic, mystery, and enchantment.

Love is the absorbtion of all that is within the universe into the essence of I...As I am the giver of all that flows freely through me, it is to you...that love is given.

Books are the basis; purity is the force; preaching is the essence; utility is the principle.

Personality as such is false. The word "personality" has to be understood. It comes from persona; persona means mask. In ancient drama the actors used to wear masks. Those masks were called personae - personae because the sound was coming from behind the mask. Sona means sound. The masks were apparent to the audience and from behind the mask the sound was coming. From that word persona has come the word "personality."

All personality is false. Good personality, bad personality, the personality of a sinner and the personality of a saint - all are false. You can wear a beautiful mask or an ugly mask, it doesn't make a difference.

The real thing is your essence.

Personality is also a necessary part of growth. It is like if you catch hold of a fish in the sea and you throw it on the shore; the fish jumps back into the sea. Now for the first time it will know that it has always lived in the sea; for the first time it will know that, "The sea is my life." Up to now, before it was caught and thrown on the shore, it may not ever have thought of the sea at all; it may have been utterly oblivious of the sea. To know something, first you have to lose it.

To be aware of paradise, first you have to lose it. Unless it is lost and regained you will not understand the beauty of it.

The microcosm of the self is essencially the same as the macrocosm of the universe.

"Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe - the open sesame to every soul. "

"Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe - the open sesame to every soul. "

The future of love is true love, a great, sweet love that isn’t pain but joy, not small, but vast, not personal but spiritual. This is where we are going; this is our true destination. Our relationships are creating themselves in wild, new, beautiful, and terribly upsetting forms. They are creating demanding experiences that are necessary for us to expand as human beings and as spirits. All our relationships are in the process of melting, if not from without – as the form of marriage itself is dissolving – then from within, where we ourselves are melting down.

The soul is shifting our relationship focus from form to content, from rigidity to flexibility, from containment to expensiveness, from our emotional needs to love.

The truth is that we have all come from love, but our relationships have often been a detour from love… Love is the river, each human being a droplet of water, and together, in spite of our fears and resistance, we are returning to love, melting and flowing toward home. We’re all looking for more love. It’s that simple. In the end, nothing else really matters to us. In the beginning and in the middle, we’re connected with the forms of our relationships, what they look like, what our parents think of them, how they stack up in the eyes of the world, and whether we’re getting our share of the goodies: sexually, emotionally, and financially.

But in the end, we won’t care about the forms. The forms will be as multitudinous as the stars and all that will matter is the love that was in them. No one can escape the divine upheaval of love. I haven’t; you won’t; our neighbors and strangers and family won’t either. Love is coming to find us. All of us. Because love is our essence. Love is who we are.

~ Daphne Rose Kingma, "The Future of Love" ~