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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity


 

Destiny

 


 

 

Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust.” Thea Euryphaessa

 

Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Destiny

Editor's Essay: Ultimate Reality

Channeled testimony from Sir John Pensley, on the other side: A spirit-person offers account of how, while on Earth, he learned to trust in the whisperings of his own soul, though condemned for this by religionists.

How to build a life in Summerland

 

 

 

Frederic W. H. Myers, in the afterlife, transmitted to Juliet S. Goodenow, Vanishing Night: “You [shall] find whatever you search after. In all the category of experience, you gain what you are searching after — in literature, in art, knowledge, science, invention, love-attainment, in culture, wisdom, riches or treasure… All is accorded you. The spiritual embodiment of your life work is your treasure in Heaven, those laid up by yourself [that is, what you have made of yourself, reflecting your particular talents], your treasures, your mansion, your reward for all you have done on the Earth Plane is laid up by yourself, for yourself, when at last you attain your reward for deeds done in the body. No arbitrary avenging angel awaits you. Creation afforded you in the beginning the implements of industrious labor to satisfy the craving of hunger of the body, and for the satisfaction of the soul. Within your complex organism the Creator placed a guide [that is, your particular desire and sentiment, which reveal destiny] — your passport through the world and through eternity.”

William Shakespeare: “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

 

When someone hurts or betrays us, how can we forgive in a deep sense, how can we regain an unblemished, pristine image of that person?

Allow me to draw our attention to an extremely important concept introduced in Krishnamurti's lecture of Jan 15, 1964.

He speaks of the unsullied mind, undefiled and unblemished mind. This is a mind, he says, spotless and unpolluted, that is not burdened by sordid images of the past.

And, of course, the most troublesome example here is how we view others. We see them, or might bring them to mind, and immediately recall some insult, a slighting, an infraction.

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Gautama Buddha: “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”

Anais Nin: “What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry, provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.”

Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle: “There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.”

Thomas Merton: “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”

 

 

Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust.” Thea Euryphaessa

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus … Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, ‘I must,’ then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.” Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

Daisaku Ikeda: “Even if things don't unfold the way you expected, don't be disheartened or give up. One who continues to advance will win in the end.”

Thomas Merton: “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”

John O'Donohue: “Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.”

Savage Garden:

“I knew I loved you before I met you
I think I dreamed you into life
I knew I loved you before I met you
I have been waiting all my life”

J.K. Rowling: “Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.”

Douglas Coupland: “We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.”

Bob Dylan: “DESTINY is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you're about WILL COME TRUE. It's a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It's best to keep that all inside.”

Simon Van Booy: “Coincidences mean you're on the right path.”

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage: “It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.”

Jennifer Elisabeth: “I met a boy whose eyes showed me that the past, present and future were all the same thing.”

Michel Faber: “A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”

 

 

“Letting go means realizating that some people are part of your history, but not part of your destiny.” Steve Maraboli

 

 

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: “Your will shall decide your destiny.”

Ursula K. Le Guin: “A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.”

Steven Erikson: “Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.”

 

Why doesn't God relieve suffering for mankind? 

The following is channeled information from the other side, received during WWII, via the mediumship of Winifred Willard, reported in “From The Seventh Plane, Inter-World Messages” (1946):

If God can [relieve suffering] for mankind, why doesn’t He do it? Why doesn’t He take control of man’s life at all times, regardless of anything else? Why doesn’t He tell the human how to go and what to do from day to day? Why doesn’t He thus avert so many tragedies and prevent so much wreckage?

It would seem on first thought that the argument is right. Countless men have asked the questions and resented what they called the indifference of God to human suffering. They ask by the millions, why God did not prevent this terrible holocaust. Why did God permit this nation or that, to go wrong; these people to mire themselves in the mud of beastliness? Why does God permit epidemics to go rampant through communities? Why does He take ones so dearly loved? Why does He not sit at the helm and guide all peoples everywhere to safe port on the other side of life?

Do you really think you'd like being treated like an animal in a cage, or a robot without sentience?

The answer is simple in its fundamentals. In His Infinite wisdom and power, God could do all these things. But instead He has given man the right of free will, to make his own choices, to be good and do right, or to be evil and go wrong. He has given nations the same right to their choices. If a nation determines to lower the moral standards and luxuriate in crime and sensuality, that nation is free to do just that. If it prefers to have government of the people, it may. If it elects autocracy and concentration of power, it may follow that path to the logical end. If it becomes a warring nation, lusting on human blood and reaching out in aggrandizement toward ever more power, that nation may go as far as its resources permit.

class is in session

God never takes the reins and makes the human follow where He drives. Infinitely higher is His gift to mankind, the gift of free will. With the gift, He places upon nations and individuals the responsibility of exercising this freedom of will and of choice and then taking the consequences of choice. It could not be otherwise. If nations or local governments permit conditions which breed disease, those nations must pay the price of the working of the law.

suffering is not a required course for graduation, it's just that most people will learn the hard way or not at all

If nations or men forget their highest selves and live on lower levels than are clean and pure and God-like, they may. For they are free agents. But they reap what they sow. The law thus laid down, is never abrogated. The nation which wars for selfish ends and through greed of selfish power, will perish by the sword and be its own undoing.

When things go well, we smugly take full credit; when things go wrong, we egocentrically blame God. It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition.

God does not send war; nor pestilence; nor tragedy; nor sickness; nor any other hard thing. But He has put into the hands of the children of men the freedom of will that enables them to direct their choices and thus to reap their own harvests of goodness and righteousness and peace and joy—or the reverse.

God’s law … knows no difference between high estate and low. It is an impersonal law which is one of God’s greatest gifts to humankind. It makes it possible for the human to hold himself in pride and with conscious greatness as he makes his way through the world, knowing that he is not slave or servant of any, not even of God; but that he is permitted the glorious right to choose for himself

'Why has this happened to me?' 'Are you not part of the human race which has luxuriated in the short-term benefits of selfishness?'

Does this mean, people will ask, that the individual upon whom trouble descends like a blighting cloud, has done some wrong and is being punished by an angry God? Could it mean that? No! It does not mean that. But the law does not operate with each individual as an isolated case, independent of the group with which he lives and works. It meshes into the community, the nation, the world in which each one finds himself… This law of the universe could not isolate each individual and deal with him through the years as a separate entity…

laissez-faire management style

... it is the out-working of man’s choosing and not of God’s will that the earth has turned red with shed blood because there are those who know no limits of greed for wicked power.

 

 

Samuel Smiles:

“Sow a thought, and you reap an act;
Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”

Thomas Merton: “First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?”

Jeanette Winterson: “Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.”

Heraclitus: “Character is destiny”

Lao Tzu: “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

Alexander Pushkin: “My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...”

Kahlil Gibran: “That deepest thing, that recognition, that knowledge, that sense of kinship began the first time I saw you, and it is the same now - only a thousand times deeper and tenderer. I shall love you to eternity. I loved you long before we met in this flesh. I knew that when I first saw you. It was destiny. We are together like this and nothing can shake us apart.”

Dan Brown: “God's will is your deepest desires.”

Clarice Lispector: “The mystery of human destiny is not that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us.”

Barbara Taylor Bradford: “She put her hand in his, and he clasped it firmly, knowing he had been waiting for her all his life.”

Rafael Sabatini: “Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo: “Fate is just another word for people's choices coming to a head. Destiny, coincidence, whatever you name it, inevitably lies in our hands.”

Lorii Myers: “When you are destined for greatness, it shows in everything you do. It becomes you. Greatness becomes you.”

Isaiah Washington: “I firmly believe that we are all given signs and dreams and put in situations that define who we were and who we are to become. All of it points towards our destiny. All we need to do is listen carefully to the messages and follow our dreams. It is in our dreams that we find our true identities and where our destiny awaits.”

 

 

“Nothing that happens to you was meant to be. The only thing about you that was meant to be is you. Blaze your own trail.” George Alexiou

 

 

David Gemmell: “Our souls are but leaves in a storm, and only the gods know where we will come to rest.”

Jacques Monod: “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.”

Bertrand Russell: “That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Israelmore Ayivor: “Decision decides destiny. What God wants you to become is the positive person you decide to become when led by God's spirit.”

C.M. Stunich: “Sometimes you don't get to choose your partner. Life chooses it for you.”

Steve Maraboli: “Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.”

Abraham Verghese: “Geography is destiny.”

Ignazio Silone: “Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.”

 

some things were meant to be...

Elvis

Can't Help Falling In Love (1961)

take my hand, take my whole life too,
because I can't help falling in love with you,
Darling, some things were meant to be...


 

 

Editor's last word: