Inner world

“ The incidents of every human life, which both make and mar, are drawn to it by the quality and power of its own inner thought-life. Every soul is a complex combination of gathered experiences and thoughts, and the body is but an improvised vehicle for its manifestation. ”

“ There is an inner world; and a spiritual faculty of discerning it with absolute clearness, nay, with the most minute and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is the outer world, in which we are encased, which is the lever that brings that spiritual faculty into play. ”

“ In fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our inner world ”

“ But the results of all these things are nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional, prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in man largely through cultivation. ”

“ Every one’s mental life may fairly be said to be divided between those ideas, thoughts, and feelings which he receives from and gives out to his social world, the social environment in which he lives, and those which belong more properly to his inner life and the innermost sanctuary of his personality and character. ”

“ We know, they say, that the world is real; but how should we know that its inner Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older sense animistic. ”

“ Through {177} this eternal process of self-differentiation and outgoing activity, the inner spiritual universe comes into being—as an intermediate Nature or world, between the ineffable Abyss of God on the one hand, and our world of material, visible things on the other hand. ”

“ But when the physical appearance evades the scrutiny of our senses and enters the sanctuary of our hearts, then it can forget itself. I know, from my childhood's experience, how devotion is beauty itself, in its inner aspect. ”

“ Thou art the main-spring, the vital secret, the fountain-source, of our existence. What is life but a genial current of joy and grace that wells up incessantly from Thy centred self? Thou art the life, the inner vitality, of our senses. ”

“ Your own thoughts, desires, and aspirations comprise your world, and, to you, all that there is in the universe of beauty and joy and bliss, or of ugliness and sorrow and pain, is contained within yourself.
By your own thoughts you make or mar your life, your world, your universe, As you build within by the power of thought, so will your outward life and circumstances shape themselves accordingly. ”

“ I, in meeting your inner self, for we nearly all have those inner thoughts, life, and aspirations, in you, I know, our natures are akin, we can when we will, and just as our mood is, talk or be silent; look into life more closely, or only at its seeming; discuss and try to solve old, deep, and almost insoluble questions that, in our inner life, have puzzled us more than once, my own, or my bright twin-spirit of the morn," he added, brightening. "We can only see and look no further (when our mood is so) than from the cloudless sky to the sunbeams or starlight reflected in our own eyes. ”

“ So, while living a life of outer consciousness you will analyse and you will see how all your complex conditions regarding which you complain, all the entanglements which we notice in different lives, all the confusion and friction which we see at home or abroad, all the heart-burnings, disillusionment and suffering which we notice amongst individuals—all these can be traced to that outer consciousness, that slavery, that dependence upon the material things of life. That is why we have to open up our inner consciousness. ”

“ There are moments in which, thanks to a series of abstractions, the spirit withdraws from its environment and, self-absorbed, analyzes and comprehends the mysterious phenomena of the inner life of man. ”

“ Leave me thought, will, sentiment, all that is internally present to my consciousness, to find myself; I ask no more. Give me communication with other beings, which affect me or are affected by me, which transmit to me thoughts and wills, which cause me pleasure or pain; I need nothing more in order to have a world which I can very well conceive. I am ignorant of the quality of the things, not of their possibility: the soul changes its state, not its nature. ”

“ Our capacities for sensation, for example, are less intimate possessions, so to speak, than our emotions and desires; our intellectual processes are less intimate than our volitional decisions. The more active-feeling states of consciousness are thus the more central portions of the spiritual Me. The very core and nucleus of our self, as we know it, the very sanctuary of our life, is the sense of activity which certain inner states possess. This sense of activity is often held to be a direct revelation of the living substance of our Soul. ”

“ By means of such discipline the mental horizon can be flooded with the sunshine of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. To inaugurate pure and lofty thinking may at first seem difficult, even almost mechanical, but perseverance will at length render it easy, then pleasant, and finally delightful.
“The soul's real world is that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we will, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. ”

“ This something—reason, consciousness, soul, call it what you will—unites us to the world; for everywhere in the world reason is at home, and gradually finds itself; it makes us aware of a great order in which we move; it breaks down the barriers of sense between us and the absolute consciousness, the eternal life—"not ourselves," yet in us and akin to us!—whence, if there is any validity in human logic, that order must spring. ”

“ Thoughts regarding the human brain, and the central point of view in which man stands with regard to the whole universe; glimpses of pre-vision from this sun and point of sight through an infinite expanse into the realms of all life, are predominant in my soul. Shall I ever be in full possession of myself, ever fully possess the world of thought which flashes through my soul? ”

“ How best shall I express it in look, in word, in deed, till my outer self becomes the truthful symbol of my inner self—till, in fact, I have successfully placed the best of myself on the outside!—for others besides myself to see, and know and love! ”

“ The distinction is not a purely sentimental one—not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world—the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world—the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, and moral life. ”

“ THE INNER LIFE. How unreal seems the existence of the inner life! How vain our intent to catch its meaning, and portray its deepest lessons, and yet, it is the reality. It forms the center around which all external life revolves, from which all outward being receives its vitality and assurance of existence. ”

“ We come now to consider the mental apparatus which is at the disposal of the self: to ask what it can tell us of the method by which she may escape from the prison of the sense-world, transcend its rhythm, and attain knowledge of—or conscious contact with—a supra-sensible Reality. ”

“ What would it mean for a soul that truly captured it; this life in which the emphasis should lie on the immediate percepts, the messages the world pours in on us, instead of on the sophisticated universe into which our clever brains transmute them? ”

“ Thus at the extreme verge of human experience these two realized that inner state of harmony, that equilibrium of spirit, towards which conscious beings strive blindly, and which sanctioning what man forbids gives reason to life. ”

“ But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. ”

“ With no effort, no consciousness of any end but that of uttering the inmost thoughts and desires of the heart, they flow out as clear, as living, as gladdening as the wayside well, coming from out the darkness of the central depths, filtered into purity by time and travel. ”

“ The fact is, the trouble is internal. You must cleanse first the inner man of the heart, and you will be surprised at the reflection of your own face then, it will change into such a mysterious winsomeness! ”

“ In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own body, of each other's persons, of these sublimities we are trying to talk about, of the earth's geography and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more? Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, your pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they to it. ”

“ They loom above us and around us in undefined and fluctuating shapes, some dark, some shimmering, but all warning us of the limitations of what we call matter, and of the need for spirituality if we are to keep in touch with the true inner facts of life. ”

“ Chapter 2 The World a Reflex of Mental States What you are, so is your world. Everything in the universe is resolved into your own inward experience. It matters little what is without, for it is all a reflection of your own state of consciousness. ”

“ For she had watched this Inner sight of Life transfuse the frail frame, and seen it illuminate the withered face and strengthen the trembling limbs, and, above all, fill the Inner woman with a joy unspeakable and beyond speech or understanding. ”

“ And finally, summing up all the other ecstasies, the strong inner movement of the soul expressing itself in strong external movements, and in the sense of living and dying in the midst of vivid and real life. ”

“ We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal. ”

“ The vindication of the importance of feeling in our life, and in particular its primacy over reason in all that has to do with man’s contact with the transcendental world, has been one of the great achievements of modern psychology. ”

“ Nothing is more striking, in the light and shadow of the human drama, than [10] to compare the inner life and thoughts of elevated and silent natures with the thoughts and plans which those by whom they are surrounded have of and for them. ”

“ There are natures of the mystical, contemplative order who seek instinctively to correlate their scenery with some mood or aspiration of their inner life⁠—who are not satisfied till they have linked it on somewhere intelligibly with their deepest being. ”

“ Slowly, through a sympathetic study of nature and of human life, through a growing sense of the soul and meaning of all natural facts and of all human relationships, and through recreating in various forms that external world which is but the objective expression of his own inmost being, the individual attains to a consciousness and unity of life and to a vision of the Eternal Fountain of Life.—The Nest. ”

“ A tending God's hand, leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one) , teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face, from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century, from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full, bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,—and why? ”

“ So there are likewise certain constant and general facts which occur in what may be called the spiritual world, the world of internal consciousness. They represent the laws of spirit—that is of the human spirit—in virtue of which things are designed to take place so and not otherwise. ”

“ His inner life—does it seem hard to realize that in that uncouth personality concentred the complex, incomprehensible, ever-shifting emotions of that inner life which, after all, is so much stronger, and deeper, and broader than the material? ”

“ All care, all anxiety, all trouble, all memory of the external world and its miserable littleness, is chased from the mind; our thoughts are absorbed in rapturous contemplation of the delights of the New World—the Paradise into which we have just been admitted. ”

“ But it is to be observed that the world which people create round about them here, being external and natural, is in correspondence not with their internal and spiritual, but with their external and natural thoughts and affections. ”

“ Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will—all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our “soul-science.” One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience. ”

“ If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now add, that there is that in us which changes not, and which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees. The sentiment from which it sprung determines the dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not, what you have done or forborne, but, at whose command you have done or forborne it. ”

“ If the outward world and the mind of man are so constructed that they fall in with, and answer to, each other,—if mere physical qualities, such as height, depth, expansion, silence, solitude, sunshine, shadow, gloom, affect the soul in certain well-known ways, awakening in us emotions of awe and wonder, of peace, gladness, sadness, and solemnity,—we naturally ask ourselves, after being thus moved, why is it we were so affected, what is it in the outward world which awakens these emotions? ”