The Practical Wisdom
of
Paramhansa Yogananda
Don't limit yourself by desires, then you only get so much and nothing more. But if you want Him you have everything.
Will power is more important to success than knowledge, training, or even native ability.
Seclusion is the price of greatness.
Environment is stronger than willpower. To mix with worldly people without absorbing at least some of their worldliness requires great spiritual strength.
People have a very distorted notion of what the path is all about. Visions and phenomena aren't important. What matters is complete self-offering to God. One must become absorbed in His love.
Man's greatest trouble is egoism, the consciousness of individuality. He takes everything that happens to him as affecting him, personally. Why be affected? You are not this body. You are He! Everything is Spirit.
Human love is possessive and personal. Divine love is always impersonal. To develop devotion in the right way, and to protect it from the taint of possessive, personal love, it is better not to seek God above all for His love until one is highly developed. Seek Him first of all for His bliss.
To achieve
perfection, one must dwell on the thought of perfection, while recognizing it as
God's gift, not as one's own accomplishment.
God is no
tyrant. If one who is accustomed to drinking nectar takes to eating stale
cheese, he soon grows dissatisfied with the change. He then throws the cheese
away and cries for nectar again. God won't refuse him, if he realizes his
mistake and longs sincerely once again for God's love.
You must be intensely active for God, before you can attain the action-less state of union with Him. Without love for God, however, no one can find Him.
Don't seek experiences in meditation. The path to God is not a circus.
Moods are caused by past over-indulgence in sense pleasures, and consequent over-satiety and disgust. If you indulge your moods, you will reinforce the mind's swing back toward sense pleasures again. For that is how the law of duality works: moving constantly back and forth, like a pendulum, between opposite states of awareness. If you remove energy from one end of the pendulum's swing, by not giving in to moods, you will find the hold that the senses have on you at the opposite end weakening as well.
When you work for God, not self, that is just as good as meditation. Then work helps your meditation, and meditation helps your work. You need the balance. With only meditation you become lazy, and the senses become strong. With only work, the mind becomes restless, and you forget God.
Doubt is dynamic energy that should be properly harnessed to move us to progressive action. If by constructive doubt we destroy some of our cherished theories, even that is better than just blindly and dumbly following others.
It is by doubting the preeminence of matter that the existence of God is established. If matter, a conglomeration of atoms, is all there is, how do these invisible particles arrange themselves to produce such an organized universe? It is impossible that inanimate atoms could put themselves together and produce intelligent beings.