Collected Passages on God in Three Parts
1. God: Quotations of Ralph Waldo Emerson
God enters by a private door into every individual.
Let us be silent, that we may hear the whispers of the gods.
Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere
The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.
The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.
The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.
Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has noprescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.
The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb.
There is a crack in everything God has made
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.
A man is a god in ruins.
When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are.
Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God.
The dice of God are always loaded.
The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.
Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
A great man stands on God. A small man on a great man. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none.
Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord’s power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe.
2. Passage on God from An Outline of Theosophy by C.W. Leadbeater
THE DEITY
When we lay down the existence of God as the first and greatest of our principles, it becomes necessary for us to define the sense in which we employ that much abused, yet mighty word. We try to redeem it from the narrow limits imposed on it by the ignorance of undeveloped men, and to restore to it the splendid conception, splendid, though so infinitely below the reality, given to it by the founders of religions. And we distinguish between God as the Infinite Existence, and the manifestation of this Supreme Existence as a revealed God, evolving and guiding a universe.
Only to this limited manifestation should the term ” a personal God” be applied. God in Himself is beyond the bounds of the personality, is ” in all and through all” , and indeed is all; and of the Infinite, the Absolute, the All, we can only say ” He is” .
For all practical purposes we need not go further than that marvelous and glorious manifestation of Him (a little less entirely beyond our comprehension) the great Guiding Force or deity of our own solar system, whom philosophers have called the Logos. Of Him is true all that we have ever heard predicted of God, all that is good, that is, not the blasphemous conceptions sometimes put forward, ascribing to Him human vices.
But all that has ever been said of the love, the wisdom, the power the patience and compassion, the omniscience, the omnipresence, the omnipotence, all of this, and much more, is true of the Logos of our system. Verily ” in Him we live and move and have our being” , not as a poetical expression, but (strange as it may seem ) as a definite scientific fact; and so when we speak of the deity our first thought is naturally of the Logos.
We do not vaguely hope that He may be; we do not even believe as a matter of faith that He is; we simply know it as we know that the sun shines, for to the trained and developed clairvoyant investigator this Mighty existence is a definite certainty. Not that any merely human development can enable us directly to see Him, but that unmistakable evidence of His action and His purpose surrounds us on every side as we study the life of the unseen world, which is in reality only the higher part of this.
Here we meet the explanation of a dogma which is common to all religions, that of the Trinity. Incomprehensible as many of the statements made on this subject in our creeds may seem to the ordinary reader, they become significant and luminous when the truth is understood. As He shows Himself to us in His work, the Solar Logos is undoubtedly triple, three yet one, as religion has long ago told us; and as much of the explanation of this apparent mystery as the intellect of man at its present stage can grasp will be found in the books presently to be mentioned.
That He is within us as well as without us, or, in other words, that man himself is in essence divine, is another great truth which, though those who are blind to all but the outer and lower world may still argue about it, is an absolute certainty to the student of the higher side of life. Of the constitution of man’s soul and its various vehicles we shall speak under the heading of the second of truths; suffice it for the moment to note that the inherent divinity is a fact, and that in it resides the assurance of the ultimate return of every human being to the divine level.”
3. Passages on God from Alice Bailey
“There is one Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested conditioned Being. It is beyond the range and reach of any human thought or expression. The manifested Universe is contained within this Absolute Reality and is a conditioned symbol of it.” Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul – A Treatise on Cosmic Fire – Introductory Postulates
“It is this divine indifference which is responsible for the fact that in attempting to describe “Pure Being” or God, and in the effort to arrive at some understanding of the nature of divinity, the formula of negation has been evolved. God is not this; God is not that; God is no-thing; God is neither time nor space; God is not feeling or thought; God is not form or substance. God simply IS. God IS – apart from all expression and manifestation as the Manipulator of energy, the Creator of the tangible and the intangible worlds, the Pervader of life, or the Indweller in all forms. God is the ONE WHO can withdraw and, in withdrawing, dispel, dissipate and devitalize all that has been created -using those words in their fullest significance.” Glamor – A World Problem, p 244
“These points need consideration and are valuable, for there are schools of thought (such as the Vedanta and other mystical groups of thinkers) which emphasize the life aspect and appear to negate duality. Other schools (such as the Theosophical, in spite of denial) teach the fact of the self and the not-self, and hence can be interpreted in terms of duality. Both are right and both need each other.” A Treatise on White Magic, p 376
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