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Asceticism is of no great importance.
There is a better way to treat one's passions than to pile on oneself ascetic practices which so often reveal a great ego and create more, instead of less, self-consciousness.
If you wish to discipline the flesh and make it a thousand times more subject, then place on it the bridle of love.
Whoever has accepted this sweet burden of the bridle of love will attain more and come much further than in all the penitential practices and mortifications that all the people in the world acting together could ever carry out.
Whoever has found this way needs no other.
******
God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love.
Now love is like a fishhook.
A fisher cannot catch a fish unless the fish first picks up the hook. If the fish swallows the hook, no matter how it may squirm and turn the fisher is certain of the fish. Love is the same way. Whoever is captured by love takes up the hook in such a fashion that foot and hand, mouth and eyes, heart and all that is in that person must always belong to God.
Therefore, look only for the fishhook, and you will be happily caught. The more you are caught, the more you will be liberated.
******
All paths lead to God
For God is on them all evenly for the person who knows with transformed knowledge.
What is best is to take God and enjoy God
in any manner,
in any thing,
and not to have to exercise and hunt around for your own special way.
All my life this has been my joy!
--from Meditations with Meister Eckhart
There is a better way to treat one's passions than to pile on oneself ascetic practices which so often reveal a great ego and create more, instead of less, self-consciousness.
If you wish to discipline the flesh and make it a thousand times more subject, then place on it the bridle of love.
Whoever has accepted this sweet burden of the bridle of love will attain more and come much further than in all the penitential practices and mortifications that all the people in the world acting together could ever carry out.
Whoever has found this way needs no other.
******
God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love.
Now love is like a fishhook.
A fisher cannot catch a fish unless the fish first picks up the hook. If the fish swallows the hook, no matter how it may squirm and turn the fisher is certain of the fish. Love is the same way. Whoever is captured by love takes up the hook in such a fashion that foot and hand, mouth and eyes, heart and all that is in that person must always belong to God.
Therefore, look only for the fishhook, and you will be happily caught. The more you are caught, the more you will be liberated.
******
All paths lead to God
For God is on them all evenly for the person who knows with transformed knowledge.
What is best is to take God and enjoy God
in any manner,
in any thing,
and not to have to exercise and hunt around for your own special way.
All my life this has been my joy!
--from Meditations with Meister Eckhart
