The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is “Look under foot.” You are always nearer to the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.
Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
Thoughts and words travel just as God’s life travels. They do not travel like an individual, but you breathe your spiritual life into the atmosphere as you do your breath, and someone else breathes it in. Those not present still receive it, for it permeats space, and all live in it and receive from it according to their unfoldment.
inscribed on a wall inside of Memorial Church at Stanford University
The man, who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring.
Karlfried Graf von Durkheim
from The Way of Transformation
Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions….
Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.
don Juan
from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Casteneda