True happiness is experienced in the present moment, not in the past nor in the future...

The powers that are available to a human being, the powers of thought, decision, love and will, are glorious in nature and limitless in effect. It is easy to take them for granted or to use them in a way that is binding rather than liberating. With philosophy, these powers may be controlled and directed […]

Julian of Norwich, who lived from 1342 to 1416. She is the first writer in English who can be certainly identified as a woman. In 1378, when seriously ill and apparently dying, she received an extraordinary series of ‘showings’ or revelations from God, which she subsequently wrote down. This goes by the title ‘Revelations of […]

Pure love can be described as that which is untainted by selfishness and which is unrestricted by any sense of limit. This is a high ideal but not necessarily easy to achieve in practice. It is therefore useful to consider one phenomenon which helps to sustain pure love. This is gratitude. The ‘Meditations’ of Marcus […]

Purohit Swami was born in India in 1882. In 1931 he visited England and met the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. The outcome of that meeting and the friendship that ensued were the translations of the Gita and the Ten Principal Upanishads that are still much in use to-day. In this passage of his autobiography he […]

Marsilio Ficino was one of the great figures of the fifteenth century renaissance. His work and ideas brought about a deep and lasting change in European society. From him and his Academy the renaissance drew a most potent intellectual and spiritual inspiration. Ficino was born in 1433. His father was doctor to Cosimo de Medici, […]

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote an essay entitled ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For’ He was born in Massachusetts, America, in 1817. He was a writer and poet and a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was the leading figure in a group of thinkers known as the Transcendentalists. At one stage in […]

The power of attention is one of the greatest powers that is available to us in the present moment. To illustrate this, there is a remarkable story about a Frenchman called Jacques Lusseyran. As a child he was blinded in an accident. Later he became a member of the resistance movement in the second world […]

Sri Ramakrishna had a famous disciple called Vivekananda. In an address in 1900 Vivekananda said this: One of the greatest lessons I have learnt in my life is to pay as much attention to the means of work as to its end. He was a great man from whom I learnt it, and his own […]

When the mind is clear and at rest and the observation is full and free, it is possible to connect with deeper powers within oneself. The clutter of ideas, impressions, likes and dislikes, which so often fills the mind, prevents this connection. When that clutter is let go of then the deeper and creative powers […]