The Centre
God, therefore, is the one most simple essence of the entire universe.
Nicholas of Cusa
Into the soul's essence no speck can ever fall.
Meister Eckhart
Once the innermost core of the mind is grasped, all else will become relatively insignificant, and crystal clear.
Chang Chen-chi
The centre of the soul is God.
St. John of the Cross
Attain the Source, and the rest need not bother you.
Yang-shan Hui-chi
It is as if, in the middle of one's being, there were a non-being. The Confucians call it the centre of emptiness; the Buddhists, the terrace of life; the Taoists, the ancestral land, or the yellow castle, or the dark pass, or the space of former heaven.
The Secret of the Golden Flower
Though God is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. The natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of His habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund or bottom of the soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity. I had almost said the infinity - of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God.
William Law
My concern is the Root rather than the stem and the flower. By Root I mean where we come from, not where we go to: not so much what we do with Who we are, as the Who itself. Not that I'm uninterested, of course, in the growth of that Root into stem and flower and fruit, but this is not my speciality. My vocation is to celebrate the Heart of the matter.
Douglas Harding
There can be no centre in infinity. Titus Lucretius Carus
For though God be everywhere present, yet He is only present to Thee in the deepest, and most central Part of thy Soul. William Law
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