The Will-To-Good Group

- a virtual organization -

Reading Center

Statement from Buddha

that we must not believe in a thing said merely because it is said; nor traditions because they have been handed down from antiquity; nor rumors, as such; nor writings by sages, because sages wrote them; nor fancies that we may suspect to have been inspired in us by a Deva (that is, in presumed spiritual inspiration); nor from inferences drawn from some haphazard assumption we may have made; nor because of what seems an analogical necessity; nor on the mere authority of our teachers or masters. But we are to believe when the writing, doctrine, or saying is corroborated by our own reason and consciousness. "For this," says he in concluding, "I taught you not to believe merely because you have heard, but when you believed of your consciousness, then to act accordingly and abundantly."

-- Secret Doctrine III. 401

"The great religious conceptions which haunt the imaginations of civilized mankind are scenes of solitariness:  Prometheus chained to his rock, Mahomet brooding in the desert, the meditations of Buddha, the solitary Man on the Cross.  It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God."

- Religion in the Making p9, by A. N. Whitehead