Goswami Kriyananda Quotes

Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment.

Happiness is NOW! It isn't tomorrow. It isn't yesterday. Happiness is like a morning glory: Yesterday's won't bloom again; tomorrow's hasn't opened yet. Only today's flower can be enjoyed today. Be happy this very moment, and you'll learn how to be happy always.

There are realities we all share, regardless of our nationality, language, or individual tastes. As we need food, so do we need emotional nourishment: love, kindness, appreciation, and support from others.

Self-acceptance comes from meeting life's challenges vigorously. Don't numb yourself to your trials and difficulties, nor build mental walls to exclude pain from your life. You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems, but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial, but in victory.

Intuition is the innate ability in everyone to perceive truth directly - not by reason, logic, or analysis, but by a simple knowing from within. That is the very meaning of the word "intuition": to know, or understand from within - from one's own self, and from the heart of whatever one is trying to understand. Intuition is the inner ability to see behind the outer forms of things to their inner essence.

If you want to do one good thing in the world, the best thing you can do is give other people joy.

Happiness is like a plant: It must be watered daily with giving thoughts and actions.

Be thou a true yogi. A yogi who understands that everything he's looking for is really inside himself. Learn to live more in the Self.

The "kingdom of heaven" to which he referred was the state of God-consciousness, not the beautiful astral heavens that most people visualize, where virtuous souls go after death.

It's the fact that your body and your personality are not God. God is you. But you can't say you are God just as the ocean is all the waves, but you can't say one wave is the ocean. And so you manifest God in a way that you don't understand. Man himself is the image of God, but he doesn't see that image in himself. And you need to meditate, and there will come your answer, not looking in the mirror.

Even-minded and cheerful. When things go bad, you'll find that the same kind of attitude comes to you naturally.

The real sign of His blessings is if you can have more and more happiness inside. Learn always to be happy; to be happy with the happiness of God. Even- minded and cheerful. This is the fastest route to divine bliss.

Happiness is a question of attitude, not a question of what's happening out there.

Happiness is reverence for all life.

I had always been very rational, but I'd always used reason in such a way as to convince myself that reasoning alone would not solve anything, really. Reasoning is theoretical. Until you feel with your heart, you don't know if a thing is true. I found that book was absolutely authentic. I absolutely knew it was the truth. My whole heart accepted it.

Spirituality means seeking experience. Not just belief.

But surrender also means your back's to the wall and saying, "Okay, I give up." But rather it's a joyful self-offering. When you come to the point of realizing that "I never get it right. I always make a mess of things; I can't do anything right. Let him do it." And then you ask his power to do it through you and you find suddenly that it works that way.

It's a mistake to think that God has conflict with anything. He's everything. So the more close you are to God, how can you be in conflict with anybody? Conflict comes from ego, and from thinking, "I'm right and you're wrong." If I can reach the point where I understand that what is right for me may be different than what is right for you, that would be a good step. But most people don't reach that point, and so they fight about it.

Trust life, even if you cannot trust people. For human nature is unreliable, but life itself is ruled by immutable law. Right action leads always, in the end, to victory.

When I find that I am more conscious, it's because I'm in tune with a higher reality. When I'm less conscious, it's because I've cut off that entunement to some extent. Maybe through drinking, through anger, through whatever. And I realized then that God has to be an infinite consciousness, and that I had to be an expression of that consciousness. And that the goal of life then must be to become more and more in tune with that consciousness. And I decided to give my life to God. And around that time, to make a long story short, I found Autobiography of a Yogi.

I know that everybody is seeking bliss. And they're all looking for it mostly in the wrong ways, and as a result of that, they err, but there's no reason to hate them; they just don't know any better. Jesus himself on the cross said, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." And so people who hate you, that's their problem. It doesn't have to be your problem. I wish them well.

Happiness is an attitude of mind, born of the simple determination to be happy under all outward circumstances.

A deliberate attitude that you have to hold in your mind as one of the basic rules of yoga is to remain even-minded and cheerful.

The secret of happiness is the determination to be happy always, rather than wait for outer circumstances to make one happy.

Joy is not dependent upon outward circumstances. Joy is something that we can have under all circumstances when we are sad or happy. Outward circumstances are always neutral. They seem to be happy or sad according to the happy or sad attitudes of the mind.

In a sense, each of us is an island. In another sense, however, we are all one. For though islands appear separate, and may even be situated at great distances from one another, they are only extrusions of the same planet, Earth.

Whatever you experience outwardly, take it within yourself and say 'I'm happy because I'm happy. I'm happy because God is in my heart.'

If anything or anyone distresses you, think how you'll feel a week - a month - a year later. If you can imagine yourself being happy and peaceful then, why waste all that time? Be happy and peaceful now.

Live more quietly. Live more seeking God's presence in your own heart.

But what is your true self is the God within you who became you, and when you realize that you are not yourself but you are he, then you discover that you and he are one, just as Jesus said. Jesus was a great master, and he had great teachings for the world, and when it says in the Bible, "All those who received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God."

Don't live to be unhappy, live to be happy. If you live to be happy you'll find the things that make you happy. And as you do that you find that sharing with others makes you much happier than taking from them.

The mastery of any subject requires that one identify himself with the particular state of consciousness appropriate to that subject.

Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a trumpet call to self- importance.

My master's visualizations were so powerful their condensation into matter was mere signature. Donald Walters, formerly Kriyananda, author of The Path about his guru Yogananda.

See what is worth learning, and what is worth doing. Thus, you gain an understanding of what is vital, and what is not vital. You need to learn what is important and what is not important. You need to understand what will move you upwards and onwards, and what will hinder you from traveling the higher path.

If you begin to identify yourself with that inner awareness, and then you realize you're not really doing anything. As long as there's the thought, "I'm trying to wake up," that thought of "I" is still there.

Become more and more centered in the Self. To live more and more in the thought that God is here in your consciousness.

You can accept it that it may be true what somebody else says, but until you have experienced it, it is not dynamic to your own awareness.

As you begin this day, tell yourself, Today I am incarnated anew! I am released from the hypnosis of my old habits and mistakes! Everything that I have long dreamed of doing I will accomplish in this, my new life.

Maturity is the ability to relate appropriately to other realities than one's own.

Happiness is understanding that friendship is more precious than mere things, more precious than getting your own way, more precious than being in situations where true principles are not at stake.

The truth is that we are a part of God. God could not have created anything except out of his own consciousness. We're all his dream, and our duty in life that God has assigned to us, that the universe has placed squarely in our laps, is to find out who we really are. "Gnothi seauton," as the Greeks used to say. "Know thyself." But to know thyself, if you trace it back, to the deeper and deeper levels, you discover that that self is not your body or your ego or your personality or your country or anything, that's just a sack of self-definitions that you carry around with you

Understand that there is no relationship between your inner happiness and your inner joy and the outer things that you experience and behold in the world, that it all begins with you, the world is a mirror to your own Self, when you can look at things and feel joy not in the things but in yourself.

Realize that to have friends one must first be a friend. Make friendship a priority in your life.

The secret of friendship is expressing kindness with your eyes and through the tone of your voice, not only with words.

If it (the good circumstances) changes will you be able to keep onto your happiness just as much? Because if not then your happiness is really built on sand.

Society cannot but depend to a disproportionate degree on its capable few to develop and flourish.

The churches had left me cold, but I thought there's got to be a God. I remember going out, this is in Charleston, South Carolina, and my desire then was to be a playwright, and I was studying theater, and I went out one night, late at night, and I asked, "What can God be if there is a God?" I wasn't sure there was a God, but if there is a God, what must he be? Well, he can't be a judge, who's up there just waiting for us to make a mistake so he can clap us into hell. There's got to be something more than that.

Happiness is a smile of comfort to the sorrowful.

That's what life is for, to find that joy in yourself.