Manly P. Hall Quotes

“In this great struggle to survive as an individual entity, the soul burdens itself with all the errors and illusions of mortality. Thus it happens that though men believe in God and in a universe of infinite benevolence, they still live in fear and constant anxiety, being far more inclined to cling to this flesh to the last possible moment, than to take a chance of going into the unknown, even though they accept it intellectually as a better state. 

Thus the struggle for the preservation of the known causes man’s greatest confusion, for it causes him to cling to the evils he now has, rather than to fly to others he knows not of. There is a total lack of the true faith and insight that enable man to move out into space, realizing that this space is God, and that there cannot, therefore, be any evil thing in it.

By faith, man should know that as surely as he himself exists, so surely is his existence essentially good, if he knows how to attain this goodness; and the evil of his existence is in his own fears and uncertainties. He is not really in danger of losing anything real, but only what he has fashioned himself, which has no foundation in reality.”

“This is a very interesting point, because all knowledge indicates man’s ignorance. Knowledge is assumed to be given to the ignorant, but as they grow further, they discover the ignorance in the knowledge itself.

They find they have not found the answer. They have become learned, but not good; they have learned to be strong, but not to love; they have found many things, but they have not found God.

And San Juan points out that when the knowledge becomes great enough, it so increases the confusion of the mind that it is even more difficult to find God.”

“This surrender seems a very strange and difficult thing for us to understand. And yet, just as the life of man here in this world can suddenly be greatly altered by a strong affection, so his total life can be greatly and permanently altered by a supreme affection, which is the love of God as the embodiment or personification of man’s love of truth.

He discovers, for example, that as this mystery unfolds within his own nature, what we call the end of knowledge is strangely and wonderfully attained in itself. Man becomes internally appreciative of true value.”

“Thus, instead of gaining only an internal silence, in the common sense of the word, he gains also that strange dynamic silence which preceded creation, and from which all things come — the silence of the heart of God.

This silence is the root of sound, and from it pours forth the fiat that fashioned the world. This is the dynamic silence of creation, the tremendous dramatic silence of new birth forever taking place- new worlds forever fashioning.”