Thoreau: On Spirituality

"The divine light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of the refraction of light, or else by a certain self-luminousness, or, as some will have it, transparency, if we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side.  At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronze colour of the moon eclipsed.  There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it." From A Week in the Concord and Merrimac Rivers "Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which it is destined to receive thence." From A Week in the Concord and Merrimac Rivers "The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statute of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision." From Walden "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions." From Walden "Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice the yoga gather in Brhma the certain fruit of their works (...) Depend upon that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully (...) The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation:  he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things.  Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rarer intervals, I am a yogi." From  The Journals (letter to Harrison Blake). "I am something to him that made me, undoubtedly, but not to any other that he has made." From The Journals