Six Mistakes of Man

• The illusion that personal gain is made up of crushing others
• The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected
• Insisting that a thing is not possible because we cannot accomplish it
• Refusing to set aside trivial preferences
• Neglecting development and refinement of the mind and not acquiring the habit of reading and study
• Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

Cireco (Roman orator)

Soulmates

If you want to attract a life partner as your soul mate, there are several illusions you will need to relinquish. One is that your soul mate is someone you will be with for the rest of your life. You can have a soul mate relationship that lasts a few weeks, months, or years. Time has nothing to do with the quality of your connection and its importance in your life.
~Sanaya Roman

The Sun In Drag

You are the Sun in drag.
You are God hiding from yourself.
Remove all the "mine" - that is the veil.
Why ever worry about
Anything?
Listen to what your friend Hafiz
Knows for certain:
The appearance of this world
Is a Magi's brilliant trick though it's affairs are
Nothing into nothing.
You are a divine elephant with amnesia
Trying to live in an ant
Holy Sweetheart, O Sweetheart
You are God in
Drag

Solutions

"Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between our apparently contradictory notions.  The notions will all be knocked from under our feet.  We shall see that there never was any problem.  And, more than one, that impression which I can't describe except by saying that it's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness.  The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer."  C.S Lewis

Effort

"As swimmers dare to lie face to the sky and water bears them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them, so would I learn to attain freefall, and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing no effort... earns that all-surrounding grace." --Denise Levertov

Spiritual Maturity

"A growing surrender to the unknown is a sign of spiritual maturity and encourages us to give up illusions of immortality we still might have and to experience in a new way our total dependence on God's love, a dependence that does not take away our free selfhood but purifies and ennobles it...those who have learned through living that there is nothing and nobody in this life to cling to, are the really creative people.   The are free to move constantly away from the familiar, safe places and can keep moving forward to new, unexplored areas of life."  Inayat Khan

Illusion

"A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering." ~The Buddha

Living Life to the Full

“When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.” ~ Paulo Coelho

Samsara

"Buddhists talk about Samsara, the world of illusion.   It is the place that most of us live.   Mistaking illusion for reality is said to be the root cause of suffering.   Yet in some immensely elegant way suffering itself can release us from illusion.   Often in times of crisis, when we reach for what we have considered our strength we stumble on our wholeness and our real power.   How we were before we fixed ourselves to win approval."  Rachel Naomi Remen

Change and Betrayal

"We  betray ourselves when we deny the change that terrifies us, when we maintain the external illusion that all remains the same."  Oriah

Soul

"The soul resides in the valleys of life and not on the peaks of intellectual, spiritual or technological efforts.   The soul is the psyches actual life including the present mess it is in, its discontent, dishonesties and thrilling illusions." James Hillman

Illusions

"If you see something as rubbish, if you see that the stones that you carried all this time are not real diamonds, what are you going to do with them?  It will not take great courage or intelligence to drop them.  You were not clinging to those stones, but to the IDEA that the were diamonds.   You were clinging to your fallicy, your illusion.   Buddha has not renounced the world, he has renounced his illusions about it."  Osho

Suffering

"The flame of suffering burns away our certainties; it also burn out the falsity within us.  Each of us lives with a certain set of illusions that are very dear to us.   We use these illusions as consoling lenses through which we view the world.  An illusion is always a false lens; it can never show us the truth or reality of a situation.   Suffering cleanses us of falsities that have accumulated in our hearts.  This liberates us from the emptiness of false belonging and allows us to belong in a real and truthful way in our lives again."   John O' Donahue