I was given a book Words To Live By from my doted bro in 2007.
Eknath Easwaran (1910-1999) is known as a spiritual teacher and the author of books on meditation and how to lead a fulfilling life, as well as a translator and interpreter of Indian literature.
In 1961 Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation ( http://www.easwaran.org/ ), Passage Meditation and Nilgiri Press, based in northern California. Nilgiri Press publishes over two dozen books he authored. The centre is represented by a simple beautiful logo, and located at what it seems - beautiful california, hopefully one day i get to visit!
Words to Live By has a quote & sharing. Below, two excerpts by Easwaran:
Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Joy of attaining perfect concentration and attention
To give full attention to whatever we are doing isn't easy when we have a job we dislike, or must work with people who are difficult. Then our attention wanders like a child's - looking at this glass for a moment, then at this table, then out the window. If we could attend a little more to the work, even when we dislike it, it would become quite interesting. When we can give it our full attention, anything becomes interesting. And anything, when we do not give it our full attention, becomes uninteresting.
We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.
George Bernard Shaw
In an indian movie I saw recently, a villager leaves home for the first time to travel to the city of Bombay. When he returns, his family and friends crowd around him, asking what it was like in the big city. His laconic reply sums up our era: "Such tall buildlings ... and such small people."
If we were asked to give an accounting of our society's achievements, we could claim many great technological developments and scientific discoveries, plenty of skycrappers, and the amasement of huge sums of money, but few truly secure, truly wise, truly great men and women. It is not for lack of ability of energy, though; it is because we lack a noble goal.
To grow to our full height, we need to be challenged with tasks that draw out our deeper resources, the talents and capacities we did not know we had. We need to be faced with obstacles that cannot be surmounted unless we summon up our daring and creativity. This kind of challenge is familiar to any great athlete or scientist or artist. No worthwhile accomplishment comes easily.
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“By virtue of being human, each of us has the capacity to choose, to change, to grow.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
