Internal Transformation

....All my idols — and I possess a veritable pantheon — I would offer up as sacrifices. What powers of utterance they had given me I would use to curse and blaspheme. Had not the prophets of old promised destruction? Had they ever hesitated to befoul their speech, in order to awaken the dead? If for companions I had never aught but derelicts and wastrels, was there not a purpose in it? Were not my idols also derelicts, and wastrels — in a profound sense? Did they not float on the tide of culture, were they not tossed hither and thither like the unlettered wretches of the workaday world? Were their daemons not as heartless and ruthless as any slave driver? Did not everything conspire — the grand, the noble, the perfect works as well as the low, the sordid, the mean — to render life more unlivable each day? Of what use the poems of death, the maxims and counsels of the sage ones, the codes and tablets of the law-givers, of what use leaders, thinkers, men of art, if the very elements that made up the fabric of life were incapable of being transformed?
— Henry Miller, from Nexus, in Henry Miller On Writing, Thomas H. Moore (Sel. & Ed.), p. 77.

....The form of meditation one follows will depend on one's maturity of mind. Though the various modes of meditation may appear different, yet they all converge on the same point; there is no need to doubt this. "Knowing one's own Self is knowing God. Not knowing the nature of him who meditates but meditating on God as foreign to one's own Self is like measuring one's shadow with one's foot. You go on measuring while the shadow also goes on receding further and further." So say the scriptures. Hence meditation on the Self is best, because the Self alone is the Supreme Self of all the gods.
— Ramana Maharshi, The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, Arthur Osborne (ed.), p. 36.

     Firm and disciplined inherence in the Atman without giving the least scope for the rise of any thought other than the deep contemplative thought of the Self, constitutes self-surrender to the Supreme Lord. Let any amount of burden be laid on Him, He will bear it all. It is, in fact, the indefinable power of the Lord that ordains, sustains and controls everything that happens. Why then should we worry, tormented by vexatious thoughts, saying: "Shall we act this way? No, that way," instead of meekly but happily submitting to that Power? Knowing that the train carries all the weight, why indeed should we, the passengers travelling in it, carry our small individual articles of luggage on our laps to our great discomfort, instead of putting them aside and sitting at perfect ease?
— Ramana Maharshi, from Who Am I?, in Ibid., p. 45.

     36. It is those who are not learned that are saved rather than those whose ego has not yet subsided in spite of their learning. The unlearned are saved from the unrelenting grip of the devil of self-infatuation; they are saved from the malady of a myriad whirling thoughts and words; they are saved from running after wealth. It is from more than one evil that they are saved.
— Ramana Maharshi, from Upadesa Saram (The Essence of Instruction), in Ibid., p. 79.

     The Buddha said to his disciples: "After my nirvana, you should rely on four things which will be your teachers: on the Dharma rather than on the man, on the meaning rather than the letter, on wisdom rather than intellect, and on sutras revealing the whole truth rather than on those revealing part of it."
— The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, translated by Lu K'uan Yu (Charles Luk), Footnote #1 on p. 133.