Entering the Castle Quotes

“Intention without discipline is useless.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Having to say, “If this is what I must accept, so be it,” can feel like chewing glass, but not being able to accept what you cannot change is like having to swallow those shards of glass.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“I have often imagined that people who carry on about how God “thinks” human beings should behave must appear to be complete fools to the divine.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“You cannot change anything in your life with intention alone,”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“of God in my life. I surrender my mind, my heart, my need for safety, and my need for rational explanations and orderly instructions to God’s will for me. I trust that all that is in my life is as it should be. I release”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“the reason you have descended into physical life is to unleash the power of your soul upon Earth.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“And eternity does not mean everlasting time but a moment without time. Wittgenstein saw it clearly: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” So”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“As the Buddha taught, the cause of suffering is attachment; the end of attachment will mean the end of suffering.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“The word deserve causes immeasurable pain.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Ultimately, this liberation of the psyche provided the essential birth canal for the self, or individualization, the greater expression of the personal ego. Personal empowerment and self-esteem—the emergence of the self—are the core accomplishments of the past fifty years. Concepts such as speaking one’s truth, getting in touch with one’s inner child, and developing personal boundaries are all products of the age of the psyche and individualization. They represent the evolution of conscious choice. That management of one’s personal power of choice defines a conscious human being.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“After all, who are you that the world should make sense to you?”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“We all have to surrender our need for our world to be ordered according to our conceptions of justice, logic, and rational motives. Just as you must have realized by now that your world does not, in fact, revolve around you—that you have very little authority over your life and that even making it alive until sundown is not in your hands—you must reach the stage of spiritual maturity where you surrender to God.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“we are safely contained within a small”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“There comes a point at which you have to let go and forgive. You can start your prayer with, 'Help me to forgive because I don't want to forgive. I feel entitled to be angry even though the anger is killing me, not them. And no one really cares that I'm angry. It's destroying my life, not theirs. I want to punish someone, so I punish my kids or I punish other innocent people who have never harmed me because it is my way of punishing them. So I really don't want to forgive because then I think all my hurt will be forgotten and that feels so unfair. But what is fair? No one's hurt is fair. I just think that justice should revolve around me. So, help me to forgive, one person at a time, beginning with _______.' That's your beginning. You take it from there until you have emptied your dungeon. Whenever you add new prisoners, you will have to revisit your dungeon.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Towards that end, the soul provides you with experiences that are necessary, that purge or cleanse you. There is no such thing as a frivolous cleansing, and such experiences can take many familiar forms, such as illnesses or persistent inner sufferings. Others may be more spontaneous, the result of a sudden “aha” that hits home when you least expect it. For example, a man who rose very rapidly in the corporate world was enormously successful, but his arrogance, insecurity, and need for approval and attention made him unbearable to be around. Once his bank account was overflowing, he declared that he was being called by God to do good in the world, informed everyone that he was now a mystic, and set up a foundation to do good. But he went about all this with his old, bullish, corporate style. He had not changed inside, but would not admit that he was still a greedy, controlling, creature in spite of his declaration that he was now a mystic. Eventually, however, he met his match in a woman involved in a global project who told him that he did not qualify as a contributor, because, ‘You have an untrustworthy soul and until your soul is cleansed, we cannot have you sit among us. You will do more harm than good, in spite of your full wallet.’ He was stunned, but eventually admitted he had an agenda behind his charity work, and began the process of purification.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Teresa (Saint Teresa of Avila) herself was starved for such companionship, especially when her mystical experiences of God reached a cosmic level to which no one else could relate. If is a great comfort to be understood by others who trust and believe in the personal experiences that we share with them, especially those for which there are no witnesses....When Teresa was fifty-two years old, she met John of the Cross, who was then only twenty-five. After they exchanged their experiences of God, they recognized each other as soul companions. In John, Teresa finally found someone with whom she could share the mystery of her life with God. After they met, she no longer needed to prove or defend her experiences of the soul. (Sadly, John burned all their correspondence shortly before his death.)
Teresa emphasized the need for companions on the spiritual journey. No one should travel through her Castle alone, she wrote again and again. Teresa knew firsthand the difficulty of inner work required of the soul pilgrim, who was as likely to experience a dark night of the soul, to borrow a phrase from John of the Cross, as she was to experience the light and grace of liberation.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. I have desires, but I am not desires. I have wishes, but I am not those wishes. I have intense pleasure and excruciating pain, but I am neither of those. I have a body, but I am not my body. I have a mind, but I am not my mind. All those can be seen, but I am the seer; all those can be known, but I am the knower; all those are merely objects, but I am a real subject or true self, not any passing parts and pieces and objects and things. I am not thoughts, not feelings, not desires, not body, not mind, not this, not that.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“To be a mystic without a monastery means that you make a conscious decision to stop being motivated by fear—fear that you don’t have enough, that you have to have more to meet your basic needs. And you replace that fear with faith and compassion. In effect, you become a powerful instrument of God’s grace. Infused with a force greater than our own—a divine intention, assistance, or insight that is spiritually rejuvenating—grace is energy that can fill you with a luminous awareness different from everyday consciousness. It motivates your spirit and lights your path from within.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Your highest purpose is what your soul can accomplish in union with your ego and God, not in opposition to them.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Decide you will trust God. The alternative—to trust nothing at all, not your God, not your world, not your relationships, not growing older—is so desperately bleak. Openly declare your loyalty to the expansion of your consciousness. You have no other choice but to pursue your mystical awakening.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“We are so deluded. We are in control of nothing whatsoever; not the weather, not the government, not the stock market, not traffic, barely our health and relationships, not the millions of decisions being made by people all over the world every second—all of which influence our lives in both unseen and all-too-apparent ways. We”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“Chaos is a powerful weapon. And we all have our weapons for creating chaos. Teresa advises us to recognize chaos as a power we use too often and to recognize that each of us has an actual relationship to chaos. Chaos is, in fact, a force throughout the universe, its own entity, an archetype of destruction and transformation that operates in every life.”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul

“For how long have you been a mass of contradictions? How long have you claimed to have faith while living full of doubt? How long have you told yourself you were devoted to living a conscious life, but have really done very little to pursue this business of truly becoming conscious?”
― Caroline Myss, Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul