The Chasm of Fire – Irina Tweedie

It is painful to see that he uses some of my money to repair the shed of dirty people who give him trouble and annoyance in every way.

After all, it was money from selling my house, and the money my husband had left me; it would have served my old age.

I gladly give it to him for a worthwhile cause but it is hard to understand why he does certain things.

After all they ruin his garden, quarrel, make a mess.  Tulsi Ram does not want to work and a shed like this one, they can erect anywhere in the Indian plains.  Why should it be in his garden?

He listened silently.

Then he told me how L gave a blanket to his Revered guru and he was so pleased with it.  But a few days later he gave it to somebody else.

'It is done like that.  We give things away, our family, our property, it matters little...'

Thomas Traherne – Centuries of Meditations

Socrates was wont to say:

‘They are most happy and nearest the gods that needed nothing’.

And coming once up into the exchange at Athens, where they that traded asked him, ‘what will you buy; what do you lack?’  After he had gravely walked up into the middle, spreading forth his hands and turning about, ‘Good gods’ said he ‘who would have thought there were so many things in the world which I do not want!’  And so left the place under the reproach of nature.

He was wont to say that ‘happiness consisted not in having many, but in needing the fewest things; for the gods needed nothing at all, and they were most like them that least needed'.

The Sutra of Hui-Neng – Grand Master of Zen [translated by Thomas Cleary]

Good friends, the Way should be fluid, free flowing.  Why then do you stagnate?  When the mind does not dwell on things, then the Way is fluid.  If the mind dwells on things, that is called self-binding.

Thomas Traherne – Centuries of Meditations

Once I remember – I think I was about 4 years old – when I thus reasoned to myself, sitting in a little obscure room in my father’s poor house.

‘If there be a God, certainly He must be infinite in goodness’.  And that I was prompted to, by a real whispering instinct of nature.

‘And if He be infinite in goodness and a perfect being in wisdom and love, certainly he must do most glorious things; and give us infinite riches’.

‘How comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor?  Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts?’

I thought I could not believe Him a God to me unless all His power were [sic] employed to glorify me! 

I knew not then my soul, … nor did I think of the heavens and the earth, the rivers and the stars, the sun or the seas; all those were lost, and absent from me.

But when I found them … then I had a God indeed, whom I could praise and rejoice in.