Quotes about Infinite

As Schiller understood in his Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, man is a creature in whom the "accidents" are truly essential; it is essentially wrong to make an abstract and absolute divorce of essence and accidents in the case of human beings. The business of man, as Hegel phrased it, is to live as a "concrete universal," a living concept who is constantly taking up the particles of life into his organismic wholeness, giving an encompassing meaning to the crazed details of our Babel of objectivity. That we participate in the power or action or genius of the infinite is demonstrated by our constant mediation between phenomena and principles, particulars and universal laws, finite and infinite. We transfigure all that is inert and opaque with the radiance of an ever-living sense of essentiality, of a "concentricity" that is and is-not our own selves.

It has to be understood that, even though the infinite or intrinsic or essential must be grasped in an "exclusionary" way (cleft apart or distinguished from the finite or extrinsic or accidental), ultimately the two domains belong together as a whole: it is only for the propadeutic purpose of self-clarification or enlightenment that the infinite must be grasped in its relative purity from the finite, a relation of opposition that may mistakenly make the infinite look as finite (oppositional, exclusionary) as the finite (since it is of the essence of the finite to stand in a relation of repellency to its other). The finite excludes everything other, but the infinite HAS no "other." The essential trait of the infinite is its INCLUSIVENESS, its power to embrace all particulars within an organismic whole.

Nothing in the matter-of-fact or finite order of experience is directly or obviously grounded in actual authoritative principles; phenomena do not permit us to see through them to their infinite preconditions, and certainly not even to comprehend or conceptualize what kinds of things those preconditions may be. It is only through holistic and variably stressed principles that we can see the formation or architectonics of finite realities, in accordance with those lawful and ordering forces. There is no empirical path to principles, no psychological route to values or ultimate duties or essential character: hundreds of millions of human beings may despair of not having "salvation" who do not and cannot ever comprehend what the issue even is, i.e. the onslaught of the finite order that threatens to make our ambiguously finite/infinite spirit into just another finite particle within the finite world. We have to be always carrying out our self-education dialectically, with one eye on each domain, the finite and the infinite, each of which demands its own peculiar modus of intelligence and insight from us.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.

Every field and flower fades, but love is infinite.

Know the difference between Pretending and Pre-tending.  
Pretending about something desired may be pleasant, yet Pretending is relatively powerless. 
In contrast, Pre-tending is to "Pre-take care of", to actively embrace the perception, risk, effort and work of something desired before it happens.  Also, in contrast to Pretending, Pre-tending attracts into motion the infinite resources of  the Universe.  I like the example of Pre-tending a beautiful rose --as in watering and caring for a rose bush long before a rose is visible.  Are you Pretending or Pre-tending your goals and dreams?"

When we were children, clouds became animals.
Now that we are adults, the vast, blue sky is a metaphor
for the infinite, upward potential of the human spirit.

Q: But what about the classical spiritual teaching of "the space between two thoughts"?

A: It is a misunderstanding for there is no detectable space 'between' two thoughts through which one can glimpse the Infinite.  The supposed 'space' is not between the thoughts but prior to the thoughts.

Perception moves at the same rate as does mentalization; therefore, to expect that perception will discern a space between two thoughts is impossible because perception would have to then move faster than 1/10,000th of a second, that is, the perceptive faculty of the mind moves at the same rate as the content of the mind.  Thus, to try to witness the space between two thoughts is like a dog's trying to chase its own tail.  This is why many serious and committed meditators do not reach Enlightenment, even after many years of devoted meditation.  They are simply looking in the wrong place (calibrates as true).

"Life is meant to be lived in eternal bliss, infinite freedom, unconditional love and unbounded awareness. Any other life is utterly missing the point of being born a human."

Today, I experience you as God experiences you -- Pure, Infinite, Laughter, Light, Beauty, Wonder and Joy.

Ever-new Joy is God. He is inexhaustible; as you continue your meditations during the years, He will beguile you with an infinite ingenuity. Devotees like yourself who have found the way to God never dream of exchanging Him for any other happiness; He is seductive beyond thought of competition. -- Sri Yukteswar, Paramahansa Yogananda's Guru, in Autobiography of a Yogi Online: Chapter 14: An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness

She was he and he was she. She was his masterpiece of light, the masterpiece with all its sheets of paper securely in place. She was his laugh and smile and serene face within the violent one, the freedom soaring in its imprisonment. She was one. She was all. She was the material embodiment of the boundless and limitless spiritual existence. She was divine, a divinity sharing itself, giving of itself, knowing itself. She was the cosmic swirls, was sweet innocence, was the softly spoken words of eternal and infinite revelations of creation, the womb of life. She was ignorance restored in all its abundant glory. Trinity was wisdom.
~ Chad Christopher Cobb, "The Sea of Milk" ~

    And what You are is the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 1st-person perspective as the great I-I, the great Self, the Witness of this page, and this room, and this universe, and everything in it, witnessing it ALL with a passionate equanimity that leaves you alone as the Unmoved Mover. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal, in its 2nd-person perspective as the Great Thou, the Great Other, before whom you bow in an infinite act of complete release and savage surrender and ecstatic submission, and receive in return the entire Kosmos as your blessing and your forgiveness and your eternal grace. You are likewise the great Unborn, timeless and eternal in its 3rd-person perspective as the Great Perfection, the Holy Spirit, the Great web of Life in all its infinite perfection and dynamic chaos, its pulsating pulsars and exploding nebulae, its stars and galaxies and planets and oceans, through which runs the common blood and bears the single heart of an Eros seeking its own higher wholeness, and always finding it, and seeking yet again, and always finding it yet once more, because You always know that You are here, don't You? And so in fun and sport and play and delight, and remorse and terror and agony and respite, You throw yourself out to start to play all over again, in this, the deepest part of You that gives birth to galaxies within Your heart, lets the stars light up as the neurons in Your brain, sing songs of love and delight to the submission and surrender of Your own good night, and all of this within the space that is You, the space that You feel as Your own I-I, or this ever-present Witness of the forms of Your own play.

    And in the great I-I, as You witness the Forms of Your own play as the entire Kosmos - in that very moment, which is this timeless Now, a Now that has no beginning and no end, there is simultaneously Spirit in its 1-st person and 2nd=person and 3rd-person forms, the Great I and We and It feel each other, and in that unitary seamless sizzling Now, which is this very moment before you do anything at all, it is, quite simply over.

    Which means, it has, quite simply, begun.

The Infinite Wisdom of the crowd, Is ignorance.
To show true compassion for that, what they do not understand.

if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. 
The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings 
should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity...and I'm not sure about the universe.

“The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.”

God is both manifest as the Totality and Allness of Creation and simultaneously unmanifest as the Godhead, the Infinite Potentiality and source or 'void-ness' prior to form.

As the smallest drop of water detached from the ocean contains all the qualities of the ocean, so man, detached in consciousness from the Infinite, contains within him its likeness; and as the drop of water must, by the law of its nature, ultimately find its way back to the ocean and lose itself in its silent depths, so must man, by the unfailing law of his nature, at last return to his source, and lose himself in the great ocean of the Infinite.

The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be.