Self-realization is the temporary separation of a being from the world, only to become more closely and more intimately united with it by becoming one with it. – Lester Levenson

There are three things that so hinder a man that he cannot know God at all: the first is time, the second corporeality, the third multiplicity. As long as these three things are in me, God is not in me. These things must always go out if God is to go in, and then you may have them in a higher and better way, namely, that the many are made one in you. Then, the more there is of multiplicity in you, the more there is of unity, for the one is changed into the other. – Meister Eckhart, Sermon Sixty Eight

Man’s loneliness is, in fact, the loneliness of God. This is why it is such a great thing for a man to discover his solitude and learn to live in it. For there he finds that he and God are one: that God is aloneness as he himself is alone. That God wills to be alone in man. – Thomas Merton

If you do not abstain from the world, you will not find the Kingdom. – Yeshua (Gospel of Thomas)

Real solitude can be had only in the mind, not in a location. Solitude is obtained through practice of non-attachment. A man in the city can be free of thought and alone in peace, while a hermit in the countryside can be plagued with the company of many miserable thoughts. – Lester Levenson

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

One person is always on the road but has never left home; one person has left home but is not on the road. Which of these is worthy of the alms of humans and heavenly beings? – Lin-chi (Watson, 1999)

viviktadharma: Sole reality: from vivikta, meaning solitude, and dharma, meaning reality. “When I think how one He is with me, as if He had forgotten all creatures and nothing existed but I alone.” – Meister Eckhart (Walshe, Vol. II, Sermon Seventy)

An Island Unto Oneself (Samyutta Nikaya, Walshe, 2013)

Monks, be islands unto yourselves
Be your own refuge, having no other
Let the Dharma be your island
Let it be your refuge, having no other
Those who are islands unto themselves
Should investigate to the very heart of things
What is the source of sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair?
How do they arise?

Meister Eckhart: The Talks of Instruction

Quite certainly, wherever or with whomever that man is, and whatever he takes up or does, the image of what he loves never fades in him, and he finds its image in everything. And it is ever the more strongly present to him the more his love for it increases, and that man will not seek rest, for no unrest disturbs him.

That man finds greater praise before God, for he takes all things as divine, and as greater than they are in themselves. Indeed, this requires zeal and love and a clear perception of the interior life, and a watchful, true, wise, and real knowledge of what the mind is occupied with among things and people. This cannot be learned by running away, by fleeing into the desert away from outward things. A man must learn to acquire an inward desert, wherever and with whomever he is. He must learn to break through things and seize his God in them, and to make His image grow in himself in essential-wise. (Walshe, Vol. III, p. 18) (See Learn to acquire an inward desert)

Meister Eckhart: “Sermon Four”

If you would find this noble birth, you must leave the crowd and return to the source and ground whence you came. All the powers of the soul, and all their works—these are the crowd. Memory, understanding and will, they all diversify you, and therefore you must leave them all. Sense-perceptions, imagination, or whatever it may be in which you find or seek to find yourself. After that, you may find this birth but not otherwise—believe me! It was never yet found among friends, nor among kindred or acquaintances; there, rather, one loses it altogether.

Accordingly the question arises, whether a man can find this birth in any things which, though divine, are yet brought in from without through the senses, such as any ideas about God as being good, wise, compassionate, or anything the intellect can conceive in itself that is in fact divine—whether a man can find this birth in all these. In fact, he cannot. For although all this is good and divine, it is all brought in from without through the senses. But all must well up from within, out of God, if this birth is to shine forth truly and clearly. And all your activity must cease, and all your powers must serve His ends, not your own. If this work is to be done, God alone must do it, and you must just suffer it to be. Where you truly go out from your will and your knowledge, God with His knowledge surely and willingly goes in and shines there clearly. Where God will thus know Himself, there your knowledge cannot subsist and is of no avail. Do not imagine that your reason can grow to the knowledge of God. If God is to shine divinely in you, your natural light* cannot help towards this end. Instead, it must become pure nothing and go out of itself altogether, and then God can shine in with His light, and He will bring back in with Him all that you forsook and a thousand times more, together with a new form to contain it all. . . . No creaturely skill, nor your own wisdom nor all your knowledge can enable you to know God divinely. For you to know God in God’s way, your knowing must become a pure unknowing, and a forgetting of yourself and all creatures. (*natural—worldly)

As for what it profits you to pursue this possibility, to keep yourself empty and bare, just following and tracking this darkness and unknowing without turning back—it contains the chance to gain Him who is all things. And the more barren you are of self and unwitting of all things, the nearer you are to Him.

When nature reaches her highest point, God gives grace: the very instant the spirit is ready, God enters without hesitation or delay. In the Book of Secrets it says that our Lord declared to mankind: “I stand at the door knocking and waiting; whoever lets me in, with him I will sup” (Rev. 3:20). You need not seek Him here or there, He is no further than the door of your heart; there He stands patiently awaiting whoever is ready to open up and let Him in. No need to call to Him from afar: He can hardly wait for you to open up. He longs for you a thousand times more than you long for Him: the opening and the entering are a single act. (pp. 39-44)

Into White: Cat Stevens, from the album “Tea for the Tillerman”

Maurice O’Connell Walshe (1987). Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises Volume I. UK: Element Books Limited.

M. O’C. Walshe (30 Nov. 2013). “Samyutta Nikaya: An Anthology.” Access to Insight (BCBS Edition).  http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/walshe/wheel318.html .

Watson, Burton (1999). The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi. New York: Columbia University Press. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-zen-teachings-of-master-lin-chi/9780231114851