"In Western thought, the body holds the soul; in Indian thought, the soul holds the body."

“If there is sufficient aspiration, invoking, and soliciting, there is no doubt that even Gods apparently lost could come back again. They are there all the time. For nothing that has any truth in it can be destroyed. It merely goes out of manifestation; but it could reappear under propitious circumstances. So could the old Gods come to life again in response to new summons.”

“Whenever the mind thinks of anything, it also invokes its corresponding form. The form has an essential sound or name attached to it. In fact, according to these seers, all phenomenal existence is nama-rupa, names and forms. Of these two, names are even more important than forms. An object is merely an outer expression, a material representation of the more internal and essential nama.”

“As regards Ramakrishna’s “practice of Islam and Christianity” of which the Mission makes so much, it finds no mention in the Gospel, the earliest and most authentic account of Ramakrishna’s thoughts and experiences in his own words. In this work we find that though Ramakrishna reminisces often about his experiences and God-filled states, there is hardly a word about his so-called practice of Islam and Christianity.... It also seems that the practice of Islam and Christianity made a less than deep impression on Ramakrishna, for subsequently he does not mention on his own initiative either Muhammad or the Koran, neither Jesus nor the Bible. Not even once! Nor did he draw from” his practice such excessive and indiscriminate conclusions as Mission monks now do.”

“The fact is that the truth of harmony and human brotherhood derives not from an absorbed trance but from an awakened prajñâ or wisdom; and its validity depends not on any dramatic ecstatic visions but it belongs to man’s deeper vision and even to his natural reason unspoilt by theologies of exclusiveness.”

“Hinduism is like a great reservoir of water from which many streams take their rise and to which they again repair after passing through many strange and fair lands. It is a great, creative matrix giving birth to many beautiful and living forms. Itself a historical, it has given birth to many sects and branches with interesting, chequered histories. Paying sole allegiance to the Guide within seated in the cave of the heart, it has put forward from time to time many teachers and sages of incomparable power and vision, incarnating the very Gods above and within.”

“For liberation, one enters into another territory called nirvana-bhumi by the Buddhists and nirodha-bhumi by Patanjala Yoga. But between this and the previous stage there is an intermeditate ground, a no man's land. It is at the apex of samprjnata samadhi and at the beginning of asmaprajnata samadhi. ... Here by sustained practice of teh Yoga of discrimination or viveka-khyati, which separates the seer from the seen and the instruments of seeing, Purusha is seen for the first time as separate from Prakriti.... When this knowledge arises, the asmita klesa is destroyed. ... But when the chitta or the buddhi knows that it merely reflects a light which belongs to someone othere than iteself, the spiritual man is born. The asmita klesa, known as the heart-knot in the Upanishads is destroyed.... But what we have called the intermediate no man's land above has a rough and ready sort of Buddhist analogue in its eighth samapatti: naivasamjna nasmajna, neither knowing nor unknowing. It means the samsara has ended but the nirvana has not begun; the mind has ended but the Self has not begun. What is called asamjna here is called asamprjnata in Patanjala Yoga.”