Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you are not grieving, you are not conscious. But if you are not rejoicing in the possibilities of how this could all change, then you are not looking through the filter of the greatest spiritual perspicacity.
The implication was that if you had any skepticism whatsoever, you were anti-science. I think there's a difference between having skepticism about science and having skepticism about the pharmaceutical industry.
Spiritual Work is not easy. It means the willingness to surrender feelings that seem, while we're in them, like our defense against a greater pain. It means that we surrender to God our perceptions of all things.
The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not out faults, but our wounds. God doesn't want to punish us, but to heal us. And that is how He wishes us to view the wounds in other people.
The media establishment senses that the boats are coming and it has taken it upon itself to stand on those beaches and do everything it can to shoot the soldiers on the boats. They know the beaches will be taken.
We are dominated on this planet by a fear-based rather than a love-based thought system. Enlightenment involves relinquishing the thought system based on fear and instead accepting a thought system based on love.
The spiritual journey, the path of recovery and personal growth, is a detoxification process in which we bring up and out the negative beliefs we have carried with us from the past and that now poison the present.
An educated child earns more later in life, knows how to keep their own children from dying, produces more food, is less likely to get AIDS, and in the case of boys, is less likely to engage in armed civil conflict.
I was very much a child of the 1960s. I protested the Vietnam War and grew up in a fairly politicized home. My father was like a cross between William Kunstler and Zorba the Greek. I grew up among left-wing lawyers.
In the hands of the ego, marriage is a prison. It is exclusive. It is a place where people are constantly reminded of their failures and limited by the energies of another person. It is rife with judgment and blame.
You playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightening about shrinking so others won't feel insecure around you. As you let your own light shine, you indirectly give others permission to do the same.
Spiritual growth increases our sense of what's possible. And as we sense new possibility, we can step into that possibility. With every word, every thought, every action, we choose what we wish to call forth in life.
When love isn't in our lives, it's on the way. If you know that a special guest is coming at five o'clock, do you spend the day messing up the home? Of course not. You prepare. And that is what we should do for love.
Old systems do not fold willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. But like empires of old - from the Romans to the Hapsburgs to the colonial British - even the largest do fall.
While overeating would be seen by some as an indulgence of self, it is in fact a profound rejection of self. It is a moment of self-betrayal and self-punishment, and anything but a commitment to one's own well-being.
If our emotional stability is based on what other people do or do not do, then we have no stability. If our emotional stability is based on love that is changeless and unalterable, then we attain the stability of God.
I've always wanted to have a radio show. It has been a dream of mine for a long time. With a radio show I can sit in a studio, or ultimately even sit in my own living room, and talk to hundreds of thousands of people.
I read an article somewhere that stated 1 in 4 American women will be considered clinically depressed in their lifetime. This should be more than a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies - it should be a wake-up call.
Just like a sunbeam can't separate itself from the sun, and a wave can't separate itself from the ocean, we can't separate ourselves from one another. We are all part of a vast sea of love, one indivisible divine mind.
Our kingdom is our life, and our life is our kingdom. We are all meant to rule from a glorious place. When God is on the throne, then so are we. When God is in exile, our lands are at war and our kingdoms are in chaos.
Looking for Mr. Right leads to desperation, because there is no Mr. Right. There is no Mr. Right, because there is no Mr. Wrong. There is whoever is in front of us and the perfect lessons to be learned from that person.
We have a lot of choice about whether to interpret something as adversity or as opportunity. I see in myself the tendency at times to make situations worse than they have to be because of my catastrophic interpretation.
Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.
Dear God, May all the tears I cry, and all the tears I have not cried but hold within, pour forth into Your hands. Please take each painful thought and unhealed wound, and send angels here to me. I long for peace. Amen.
I'm certainly not saying anything new, and I'm not even saying anything all that different from what everyone else I know is saying right now - I'm saying what millions of people are saying. I'm just saying it publicly.
The Republican corporatists are worse than the Democratic corporatists, but only to a degree. And Republican corporatists are at least true to their principles, however abhorrent those principles might be to some of us.
I realize that the curriculum is my life on any given day. At this point, more than anything, my spiritual path means looking at every circumstance and trying to see my part in where it's good and where it's not so good.
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "No lie will last forever." We have to work at removing lies from our own hearts. And on the national level, we do this not because we blame our country, but because we love it.
God would have us move to the highest level of our nature, and that means that we need to understand that our capacity to deal with the spirit-the darkness of the spirit with the light of the spirit as our greatest power.
Enchanted partnership begins with the conscious understanding, on the part of two people, that the purpose of their relationship is not so much material as spiritual, and the internal skills demanded by it are prodigious.
In asking for miracles, we are seeking a practical goal: a return to inner peace. We’re not asking for something outside us to change, but for something inside us to change. We’re looking for a softer orientation to life.
You can know everything that the books have to say, but ultimately it boils down to whether we do the inner work of devotion and surrender, whether we can put aside our own agendas and allow the spirit to move through us.
Growth is a detox process, as our weakest, darkest places are sucked up to the surface in order to be released...often, it is not a change in partners but rather a change in perception that delivers us to the love we seek.
When we stay close to the wisdom of our knowing, seeking solutions to our problems in the sanctuary of the heart and not in the vanity of the mind, then we can pretty much trust in the unfolding, mysterious wisdom of life.
God's truth is literal truth. The illumined mind has more operative cells. In reclaiming the mystical, we take back our whole selves. Formerly barren mental lands spring to new life through the planting of spiritual seeds.
The work of intimacy, of course, is to learn to both show your own illumination, and to see it in a way that the physical eyes cannot reveal. In a way that only the heart can reveal: the illumined beauty in another person.
There is one God. The Jews and the Christians have no monopoly on God. I'm speaking about the same God the Hindus talk about, the same God the Muslims talk about, the same God that the Taoists and the Confucians talk about.
Nobody has to tell me about the glories of the capitalist system. But what concerns me is that there no longer seems to be a commitment to make the opportunities afforded by technology and capitalism universally accessible.
Every aspect of life is pre-programmed to rise to its highest creative possibility. We don't have to make that happen, but we have to allow it to happen. And that itself is the struggle of life: resisting the resistant mind.
Go forth in confidence and go forth in peace. For there are angels to your left and angels to your right; angels in front of you and angels behind you; angels above you and angels below. You are loved, and you are not alone.
I sometimes say to people who have life-challenging illnesses: "Right now you are tempted to think that if you were physically well you would be happy. But if that were true, everybody who is physically well would be happy."
Personal growth can be painful, because it can make us feel ashamed and humiliated to face our own darkness. But our spiritual goal is the journey out of fear-based, painful mental habit patterns, to those of love and peace.
When love is our guiding light, we can break through barriers to be of loving service to the world. Gaining the courage and confidence to stand up for what you believe in is not always easy, but it's fully within your reach.
A primary goal of the spiritual life is to learn to quiet the mind through prayer and meditation, through spiritual practice, so that we can hear what in both Judaism and Christianity, is called the small, still voice within.
The world in which we live today-reflecting in so many way the opposite of our sweetness and love-reminds us how desperately important it is to break the spell that's been cast on the human race and retrieve our shining self.
You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure about you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.
Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world. And we find that we cannot. For all darkness in the world stems from darkness in the heart. And it is there that we must do our work.
Once you know that every moment and every person and every situation has something to teach you, you're a student all day. You know it's the depth of your observation that is the issue - not how much the world has to show you.
We can't look to the world to restore our worth; we're here to restore our worth to the world. The world outside us can reflect our glory, but it cannot create it. It cannot crown us. Only God can crown us, and he already has.
I don't think that anything that anyone is doing today that is being pointed at as the "enemy" or "the problem" is as dangerous to our future as the fact that there are so many pointed fingers. The pointed finger is the enemy.