Why does God permit all this?

Moses Maimonides:
We suffer from evils, which we have burdened upon ourselves and we ascribe them to God, who has well and truly nothing to do with them.

Gertrud von Le Fort:
Suffering too is only Love. Wait a little while, and you will experience it.

Herodot:
Sufferings are lessons.

Grail Message:

Both sorrow and joy are constantly rapping at the door to encourage and arouse man to awaken spiritually. He is then very often freed for a few seconds from the trivialities of everyday life, and in happiness or grief vaguely senses his affinity with the spirit pulsating through all that.
(Lecture: Awake; Read more)

God does not will that His people should suffer! He wills only joy, love and happiness! The way within the Light cannot be otherwise! The way towards the Light has stones only if man first places them there. Abd-ru-shin

What is Happiness?

Seneca:
Never regard anybody as being happy, who depends on outward things.

Claude Henri de Saint-Simon:
One can only be truly happy, if one tries to find one’s happiness in the happiness of others.

Epiktet:
Therefore I assert that joy is the alpha and the omega of a happy life. --

Theodor Fontane:
To make others happy is the greatest happiness, but also to receive in gratitude is happiness. --

Grail Message:

Learn to recognise your path in Creation, and you will also know the purpose of your existence. Then you will be filled with grateful rejoicing, and the greatest happiness a human spirit is able to bear, which lies solely in the recognition of God! You earthmen are in this Creation to find supreme happiness! In the living language which God speaks to you! Abd-ru-shin
(Lecture: The Language of the Lord; Read more)

Can I evade responsibility in life?

Otto von Bismarck:
Fear of responsibility is a disease of our time. --

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
Being human means to be responsible. --

Chinese Wisdom:
Take heed of your thoughts! They are the beginning of your deeds!

Grail Message:

This question is always one of the first, because the vast majority of people would be only too glad to throw off all responsibility, and cast it on anything rather than themselves. That this is in fact self-humiliation causes them no concern here. In this respect they are really remarkably humble and modest, but only so that they can go on living all the more merrily and unscrupulously. Just as the harvest yields a multiple of the seed, so man always receives back greatly multiplied what in his own intuitive perceptions he awakens and sends out, according to the nature of his volition. Thus man bears spiritually the responsibility for everything he does. This responsibility begins already with the making of the resolution, not just with the accomplished deed, which is simply a consequence of the resolution. And the resolution is the awakening of an earnest volition! Abd-ru-shin
(Lecture: Responsibility; Read more)

What is Spirit, what is the Soul?

Martin Buber:
Spirit is not a late blossom on the tree of mankind, but it is that, which makes up a human being.

Vergil:
The body must follow almighty death, but the spirit lives in eternity. -

Pindar:
The spirit moves matter.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
The soul of man resembles the water. From the heavens it comes, and down to earth again it must flow, eternally changing.

Grail Message:

Spirit is not wit, and not intellect! Nor is spirit acquired knowledge. It is erroneous, therefore, to call a person “rich in spirit” because he has studied, read and observed much and knows how to converse well about it, or because his brilliance expresses itself through original ideas and intellectual wit. Spirit is something entirely different. It is an independent consistency, coming from the world of its homogeneous species, which is different from the part to which the earth and thus the physical body belong. Spirit is the origin, the core and the final goal of man. Spirit is he himself, without any other kind of covering. Soul is this same spirit enveloped by one or several different coverings, but without the gross material covering, the physical body. Therefore the soul must also bear within it the spirit itself as the actual, living human being. Abd-ru-shin
(Lecture: Spirit; Read more)

Read also: "No Time for Spiritual Things" an Essay from the book "A Gate Opens" by Herbert Vollmann.)