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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

How To Sit Quietly
In A Room Alone

Epigraph

 

 

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“All of humanity’s problems stem from an inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal 

"One of the first things to be done upon arrival here [in Summerland] is to realize that thought is concrete, that it can create and build, and then our next effort is to place our own thoughts under proper and adequate control." Father Robert Benson, Life In The World Unseen

"New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, but from an inspired researcher, struggling [if need be, for years] in lonely thought on one single point." Max Planck

"What do you [Kepler] think of the foremost philosophers of this University? … they have refused to look at the planets or Moon or my telescope ... the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." Galileo

"There is light within an enlightened person, and it shines on the whole world." Jesus of Nazareth, The Gospel of Thomas

 

from the Course In Miracles:

 

If you recognize you need do nothing, you have withdrawn the body’s value from your mind… To do nothing is to rest, and make a place within you… Into this place the Holy Spirit comes… there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity. This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent… It is this center, from which the body is absent, that will keep it so in your awareness of it.

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The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)

Ramanujan has traveled 6000 miles from Madras, India and, in dream come true, is about to step onto the venerable campus of Trinity College, Cambridge. Awestruck, he hesitates, inwardly gasps, before the formidable fortress of knowledge:

Professor John Littlewood: “Yes… the intended effect. Do not be intimidated. Great knowledge often comes from the humblest of origins.”