All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times. But to make them truly ours we have to think of them over again honestly until they take root in our personal experience.
The ability to think limitlessly is the unique quality of human beings. We get all kinds of thoughts, we receive many as we interact with others and this leads to further thinking. Thus thinking is an incessant process. While thinking is a natural and even inevitable process,gettingthoughtsofhigherandnoblerorder(thanthelowand the commonplace ones) is a great quality. One has to strive to inculcate and develop this trait. It is not enough to be contented assuming that we always entertain lofty and great thoughts. We have to be receptive to such thoughts.
AÉlÉÉå pÉSìÉÈ MëûûiÉuÉÉå rÉliÉÑ ÌuɵÉiÉÈ | May noble thoughts come to us from all directions.
This ardent prayer for one’s own elevation is from Rig-Veda. Our Vedas and Upanishads and sacred texts are replete with such maxims which ennoble our lives.
When every hope is gone, ‘when helpers fail and comforts flee’, I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real, all else unreal.
Such worship or prayer is no flight of eloquence; it is no lip-homage. It springs from the heart. If, therefore, we achieve that purity of the heart when it is ‘emptied of all but love’, if we keep all the chords in tune, they ‘trembling pass in music out of sight.’ Prayer needs no speech. It is in itself independent of any sensuous effort. I have not the slightest doubt prayer is an unfailing means of cleansing the heart of passions. But it must be combined with utmost humility.