c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Religion has no power if God is not truly 'dangerous,' but religion also seeks to manage God, and make God safe.The second commandment speaks against the management of God. We cannot help but make our images of God, for God has given us imagination. But every image we make of God is finally a box: a cage, potentially an idol, from which the living God keeps breaking out. And if we try to keep God there, then God comes out with 'jealousy' to overturn our careful construction.The third commandment speaks against the management of God. To take God's name in vain is to make God useful to our projects and ourselves. We are wont to trivialize the truth of God and then disparage it for being trivial. We are told God's name in order to love this God, but loving God is not managing God but fearing [respecting] God. And with God, the attitudes of love and fear [respect] are not contradictory but complementary.
— Daniel James Meeter
To create a community where faith matters not just in theory but in reality, faith has to be a public value, not just a private one.
— Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses
When we surrender, we allow the universe to work its magic; we say yes to infinite possibilities; we trust that things will work out as they are meant to; and we give ourselves permission to let go of the outcome. This can be liberating, intimidating, blissful, scary, and a swirl of so many other emotions. But in the end, if we are true to our heart, life unfolds with magnificence…and we get to celebrate
— davidji
We have between 60,000- and 80,000 thoughts a day. That’s a thought every 1.2 seconds…but we are not our thoughts – we have thoughts. Just like a cell phone is not our texts…it receives texts but they are not the phone. You have thoughts but you are not your thoughts.
— davidji, Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation
Persistent problems, however unpleasant they may seem, contain the unprocessed and unexamined thoughts and feelings that, if left alone, keep you from your greatness. That’s why the pain, emptiness, and longing you feel can be your greatest gift—it can motivate you to examine parts of yourself that have been overlooked, forgotten, or hidden. It’s the irritant of sand in the oyster, which is the impetus for the pearl. In walking the conscious life path, you reveal your deepest Reality, layer by layer. You come home.
— Jennifer Howard
Love one another." If we took those simple words to heart, we'd already be the Buddhas Jesus wanted us to be.
— Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older
Presently the newly awakened psychology will gradually accomplish what pure religious devotion might have done: throw out Paul, and let Jesus in!
— Jan Willem Kaiser, De Mysteriën van Jezus in ons Leven
My prayer is an attitude of pure gratitude for having the opportunity to experience life on this earth with all its pain, heartache, worry, and turmoil; coupled with this gratitude is the thankfulness for just having the opportunity to have lived. That is fairly easy on good days but difficult when life puts rocks and boulders in the road.
— David W. Earle
The same principles that make a spiral galaxy also create the structure of a seashell and unfurling of a fern. This is why ancient spiritual people used natural symbols to convey universal concepts.
— Belsebuub, Return to Source: How Enlightenment is the Process of Creation in the Universe in Reverse
Pleasure brings pain, but inner silence brings nothing negative; it is in itself of great value and is a far better way to be than to be in ego states.
— Belsebuub, The Awakening of Perception: A Collection of Talks and Articles
These Souls with great Material Possessions were allowed this because of Past Good Works in their Previous Life, but now feel there is no need for Spiritual Progress. They are too easily forgetting why they were granted this Material Wealth in the first place. Therefore we must stop them from accumulating more Material Gains to Guide them back to the right path.
— Mary Todd Lincoln
Persistent problems, however unpleasant they may seem, contain the unpro¬cessed and unexamined thoughts and feelings that, if left alone, keep you from your greatness. That’s why the pain, emptiness, and longing you feel can be your greatest gift—it can motivate you to examine parts of yourself that have been overlooked, forgotten, or hidden. It’s the irritant of sand in the oyster, which is the impetus for the pearl. In walking the conscious life path, you reveal your deepest Reality, layer by layer. You come home.
— Jennifer Howard
We’re giving Our Book to Earth so that All Earth Souls will Open up to the Universe and be aware of Our Existence.Through this awareness Earth Souls can Progress more and gain a clearer Understanding of Life after Death.There are too many Closed Minds on the Earth Plane. We are asking Earth Souls to Open Their Minds and Souls. That’s the only way they will Progress back to the Universe.In the Universe, Progress, and Learning never stop. It is Eternal.Growth and Development in the Universe is far more rewarding than any rewards found on the Earth Plane – as long as the Soul is willing to Work.The Pyramids are Very Spiritual, and they represent the Universe’s Triad.The Pyramids were given to Earth by the Universe, and Thought Power built them.The Pyramids were built for the whole Earth to use to help all find themselves in their own Inner Soul.This Power was taken away from them because greed and selfishness took over the people on the Earth Plane without leaving room for even a bit of love.
— Mara
We spend so much of our life in activity…we almost feel uncomfortable just being – but that is huge restorative break in the wild swirl of activity around us – it’s like pulling back the bow in archery – like taking that big deep breath in before you dive into your day.
— davidji
For most of us enlightenment is not a destination or graduation into a permanent higher state of consciousness, but a moment-by-moment experience constantly fluctuating between degrees of wholeness and limited consciousness. I like to call this “enlightening-ment.
— Jennifer Howard
...It really IS easier to experience spiritual connection when your life is in the process of coming apart.
— Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names--Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
God has given me a lifeboat and said... 'Moody save all you can
— Dwight L. Moody
The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)
— Charles E. Moore, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard
Even the juncture in history and the zeitgeist we live in is something we choose, setting the scene for the spiritual fodder we need to grow and achieve deeper elevation of our souls.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The music plays . . . and your sense of reality is heightened to a dream.
— David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
Now listen for your song. Everybody’s got a song. When I used to chase the Trane— John Coltrane that is— he used to tell me, ‘If I know a man’s sound, I know the man.’ Do you hear the melody playing in your mind? Does it move you, nudge you off your seat?
— David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
He felt the urge to go into the desert, to see if it’s silence held the answers to his questions.
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...
— David Zindell, The Wild
When everyone disconnects you...Your Lord connects with you.
— Adil Adam Memon
Our thoughts are not roadblocks to our meditation, they are the divine expression of the universe and the building blocks of infinite possibilities available to us in every moment.
— davidji
I write because I hope.I write because I have faith.Hope.Hope alike a fresh flower grows in the sand of my heart .Faith.Faith alike the Sea will be perishing only when Sea disappears .
— Katerina Kostaki, Cosmic Light
If there is a single factor that makes spiritual direction effective as a change agency for the soul, it is this: spiritual direction holds our shame at bay long enough for us to see ourselves as God sees us in Christ.
— Gary W. Moon
History has been written, but it has not always been right or complete.
— Toi Thomas, Giovanni's Angel
Going beyond thoughts is merely to reduce the multiplicity of your thought.Thoughts lead to words, words to language, language to action. Action to realization, and back again to thoughts.For the mind is made up of words, language and logic, until it dissolves into consciousness.
— Gian Kumar
Because your character is always full of ambition, the news of my being locked up must have been much harder on you than it was on me. When I was arrested, it was almost a relief to know that I could now experience what you were experiencing yourself. I am so afraid that they are breaking your spirit.
— Diet Eman, Things We Couldn't Say
When you can quiet the fluctuations of your mind and drift into stillness & silence, you can finally hear the whispers of your heart… the whispers of god.
— davidji, Secrets of Meditation: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace and Personal Transformation
One of my confreres sketched an explanation that attracted me: since the process of digestion is under the control of the brain, its cessation gave repose to the brain, allowed it a vacation.
— Adalbert de Vogüé, Aimer Le Jeune: L'Experience Monastique
Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.
— Adyashanti
Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
The degree to which your Consciousness expands, is the degree to which you understand yourself and the universe.
— Gina Charles
Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.
— Anne Lamott
All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent
— John Steinbeck
The great fault of modern democracy -- a fault that is common to the capitalist and the socialist -- is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness....The great curse of our modern society is not so much lack of money as the fact that the lack of money condemns a man to a squalid and incomplete existence. But even if he has money, and a great deal of it, he is still in danger of leading an incomplete and cramped life, because our whole social order is directed to economic instead of spiritual ends. The economic view of life regards money as equivalent to satisfaction. Get money, and if you get enough of it you will get everything else that is worth having. The Christian view of life, on the other hand, puts economic things in second place. First seek the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added to you. And this is not so absurd as it sounds, for we have only to think for a moment to realise that the ills of modern society do not spring from poverty in fact, society today is probably richer in material wealth than any society that has ever existed. What we are suffering from is lack of social adjustment and the failure to subordinate material and economic goods to human and spiritual ones.
— Christopher Henry Dawson, Religion and World History: A Selection from the Works of Christopher Dawson
Every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus - you have to react, you follow every impulse.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/Other Writings
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—universe.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Without energy being invested in resisting the unwanted or dueling with fears, we have more energy and attention available for noticing not only the disturbing, but the wonderful...When we are not fixated on threat and defending ourselves, when we're not exhausted and burned out from chronic stress, we are able to see the daily evidence that we are in the midst of a mind-blowing miracle called Life....Then we will experience breathtaking, heart-rippling moments that counterbalance every trial and tribulation. When we're fully conscious of the universe's artistry and generosity, who needs psychodelics or Prozac?
— Charlette Mikulka, Peace in the Heart and Home: A Down-to-Earth Guide to Creating a Better Life for You and Your Loved Ones
Don't just stand there and nod. The mind observes and cogitates, the heart engages, and I would encourage you to engage with the process.
— Etienne de L'Amour, The Host and the Guests
[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.
— Johann Baptist Metz, Poverty of Spirit
Nothing is static, Energetic frequencies are changing all the time. We, and everything in our world, are made of energy and as such, we too are changing---with or without our awareness.
— Elaine Seiler
Love is marked by the inward beauty of Christ in your heart and the way you treat others whether they are in your presence or not. A person who is showing Christ-like Love will not say bad things about others when they are not around. Instead they will seek to encourage them and build them up in the Lord at every opportunity.
— Anya vonderLuft
The great are strongest when they stand alone,A God-given might of being is their force.
— Sri Aurobindo, Savitri
One of the first things we learn from our teachers is discernment: the ability to tell truth from fiction, to know when we have lost our center and how to find it again. Discernment is also one of the last things we learn, when we feel our paths diverge and we must separate from our mentors in order to stay true to ourselves.
— Anne  Hill, The Baby and the Bathwater
This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
— G.K. Chesterton, Manalive
By embracing your subconscious, you gain a different way of seeing and experiencing—an expanded perception that opens a doorway, not only to lucid dreams, but also to the mythic dimension.  As in lucid dreams, you see yourself or others with new eyes; your senses awaken and grasp an experience more fully than ever before; suddenly, you find your ears are open to hear with a deeper understanding.
— Jenny Davidow, Embracing Your Subconscious: Bringing All Parts of You into Creative Partnership
If all of the steps of surrender are present, then a great Rembrandt or Monet will evoke love because the artist is simply there in all his naked humanity.
— Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life
Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.
— Budha
And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again...Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal they have believed in, or the country and community they love, afflicted with ills.
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Soon we shall discover that the temple of all humanity is nothing less that the Temple of the Living God!" ~ Chapter One, "The Awakening" ~ Discovering the Bliss of your True Divine Reality
— Linda De Coff
...your tranquil yes to the changing over into the formless void of the unlimited.
— Hermann Hesse
If you are interested in equality at all costs, you should never have gone looking for your power in the first place. Holding authority with integrity is more important than making others feel good.
— Anne  Hill, The Baby and the Bathwater
Let us love. Let our lives be a perpetual song of love for God, first of all, and for all human beings who suffer, love, and mourn. Let deep joy live in us. Let us be like the lark, enemy of the night, who always announces the dawn and awakens in each creature the love of light and life. Let us awaken others to the spiritual life.
— Elizabeth LeSeur
People need to believe in more than what they see in everyday life. Somewhere inside, we all know that there is more out there than we experience normally. A belief in the other world can help explain why things happen to us. It can give us hope. I feel that we all hope we never get to be too old to fly to Never-Never Land or go through a wardrobe into Narnia. We want to think that there is something looking back at us when we look at the stars. We want to think that just around the bend in the forest, we'll find fairies dancing in a ring. I hope that my work affirms those beliefs," she continues. "I want people to think of my work as a key to that other world.
— Wendy Froud
Zachary smiles, and I wonder if he's felling different. Because standing out here waist deep in Gossimer Lake, next to my best friend, I'm feeling different-light and good and maybe even holy.
— Kimberly Willis Holt, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town
It's all about having fun and feeling good!
— Marissa Campbell, LIFE: Living In Fulfillment Every Day
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
— N. Scott Momaday
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
— Thomas Merton
I don't argue things being spiritual vs scientific, because I've never met anyone who knows enough about either to be convincing--including myself.
— S. Kelley Harrell
Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous…we don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
For I was reared in the great city, pent with cloisters dim,and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shall thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and al things in himselfGreat universal teacher! He shall moldThy spirit and by giving , make it ask.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants’ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days “affords” us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, “the world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise.” “Insofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls…he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness…through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed.
— Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
By bringing a soulful consciousness to gardening sacred space can be created outdoors.
— S. Kelley Harrell, Nature's Gifts Anthology
If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.
— Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
What are the messages that you are entertaining?
— Asa Don Brown
Regardless of geographical region or culture gardening is perhaps the most common and shared experience of Nature.
— S. Kelley Harrell, Nature's Gifts Anthology
The secret of seeing is, then the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise. I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return form the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth. Ailinon, alleluia!
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.
— David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right
Bondage is when the mind longs for something, grieves about something, rejects something, holds on to something, is pleased about something or displeased about something.
— Ashṭāvakra
I believe that secularism is not the enemy of spirituality. Our spirits are in fact secular and free. But the enemy of your spirit is materialism which produces legalism. People scramble for the "perfect law" in order fix everything, while failing to see that law only points towards what is material. And so, people find themselves going around in a circle that will never end. The key is to break away from that circle. You have to begin focusing your attention onto what is inside you and what is inside everybody else. This will in turn produce common sense, intuition, and understanding. Then comes strength.
— C. JoyBell C.
To the wizard death is merely a belief.
— Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want
Be Good-Do Good-Be One
— Kirpal Singh
What you gain another will lose, for What is there is all there is. What you share another will have, for What is there is enough for all.
— Rohan and Mohan Perera, Another Day from the World of Ro and Mo
Go where thou wilt, seek what thou wilt, and thou shalt not find a higher way above, nor a safer way below, than the way of the holy Cross."- Thomas A Kempis (The Following of Christ)
— Thomas à Kempis
God can use the jawbone of an ass!
— Winkie Pratney
Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.
— Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
We work very hard to have what Buddha gave up to become enlightened. Does that mean we are benighted?
— Rohan and Mohan Perera, Three Days from the World of Ro and Mo
Today's my birthday On mans scale 53 is a life more than 1/2 over. On the infinite scale of an eternal being I am just a cell of life that has forever to go!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
I am moonlighting for the Buddha.
— John Burdett, Bangkok Haunts
Blessed be the ones that are free that have detached from possessions that can possess Thee.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Become the difference you want to make," and the heart of your mind will feel what the mind of your heart knows.
— Stan Ellis, The Chrysopoeia Revelation: Become the Difference
I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!"It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
What is it about human nature that when we are touched in a way that is life changing we want to share the experience with others. I have to think it is about bringing gifts from spirit back to the spirit in humans. All I know is that after I experienced the four years of intimate conversations with God/spirit/my higher self/the universe and the resulting growth and healing, I would ask myself, “What should I do?” and the answer was always, relentlessly, write a book and share it.
— Bobbi Junod, Do You Doubt the Daffodil?
For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us."Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, "what the core of contemplative life is?""Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, "Prayer." Or maybe "The search for God." Or "Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.She saw I didn't see."It takes time to do this," she said finally.Her "this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.
— Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime
There's isn't any slight of hand in Spirituality, everything you desire is right there for you to see.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Faith encompasses so much more than a denomination!
— Deborah Brodie
I Love Spirituality it reminds me of the Old Quaker Oats Commercial. "Nothing is better for thee than me"!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Is it not by asking questions that we stimulate each other to reach more deeply into our own source and, thereby, approach the Source, both together and in our different ways? (7)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
The Lord does not require us to wear a [cassock] — He wants us to be good and kind.
— Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives:  The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to be irresponsible, yet for every accountant who deserts his family and sails for Tahiti, ten American men have heart attacks at their desks, after hours.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
The ego is like a clever monkey, which can co-opt anything, even the most spiritual practices, so as to expand itself. (155)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms.When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.
— Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar
I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley
My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
If there is one ruler that can harmonize and unify the mob of characters [in our astral body], it is the Ego (the Higher Ego, or Self, or Spirit). The more the Ego shines like a sun at the center of gravity of the astral body, the more the different characters start orbiting around it. Instead of working only to satisfy their own selfish desires, the characters start manifesting the purposes of the light and of the Spirit. Instead of plotting for the success of their own ambitions, they start accomplishing the works of the Higher Self... The unveiling of the Self begins a process of unification--a new astral body slowly develops. In this new, or transformed, astral body, the different parts are penetrated by the light of the Self. Therefore they are not only united around the Self, but are also cemented to it... [Before this process], one is nothing more than an appearance: it is the illusion of being one person...
— Samuel Sagan, Entity Possession: Freeing the Energy Body of Negative Influences
What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
Peace and supreme joy may seem like end-states to practitioners on more difficult spiritual paths, but the path of devotion should be filled with peace and joy from the very beginning. Their absence is an indication that something is amiss. (125)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
Probably our lives are full of symbols which only an unacknowledged sense perceives. Spiritual events assume a material guise, in accordance with some creative principle, but do not insist on recognition. ("Absolute Evil")
— Julian Hawthorne, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
When the soul is consciously awakened can it comprehend the acquiescence of Muhammad, the unshakable foundation of Abraham and the very nature of Christ, equating the Aleph in the sealed Universe — As The Soul Speaks
— AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity
If the many and the One be indeed the same Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of realization. No distinction, henceforth, between sacred and secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as to quit and to avoid.
— Nivedita
Do not contemplate the Essence of the UnVeiled, for the UnVeiled therein your World does not hold to polarities, nor of your conjectures; Chapter "The Unveiling
— AainaA-Ridtz, The Sacred Key — Transcending Humanity
Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.
— Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
[A] practitioner of any spiritual path must have complete confidence that his adopted path is, for him, superior to all others. (57)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
Tethered to the universe by tendrils of history, with threads of continuity descending to God knows where, I see that I'm more than the dust I'll become." This quote is from my novel, "Whispers from St. Mary's Well." Many readers have said that, like the fictional narrator of the story, Carrie Rose Stillwell, they felt a deep connection to the universe through past, present, and future experiences, after reading the story of a child who communicates with future generations.
— Carol Kenny
It's not about saving humanity. It never has been." Mantrella, THE WAKING GOD TRILOGY
— Philip F. Harris
men should not be sexing their women in the missionary position because they are facing away from the sky. Instead of looking down, men are to look up. To the vastness of Father Sky
— Matthew Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
Ageless Wisdom is etched in the belly of the Earth, and you are one with Its Soul.
— Quandi Jackson, How 2 Fish: The Book
Seek not outside yourself for love, because what you are looking for is what you really are.
— Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D.
Behind your skin, your bones, your heart and your mind, you are simply a mirror of the universe, all of its history and its future in a single breath.
— Courtney Beck, Conversations with Krishna
We all have those things that help us carry on through life. It is important that these things upon which we depend for daily strength are healthy for our character rather than harmful. We must ask ourselves whether the comforts we reach for each day are vices or virtues? Do they feed the best parts of us or do they rob us of them? Even when we are at our most fatigued and are tempted to reach for self-destructive things, we must try to seek out and take solace in those things that will lead to our eventual renewal; rather than those things that will only serve to bring us lower.
— L.M. Browning
Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
— Richard Guindon, Guindon: Michigan So Far
No one can escape karma. Two events which may, at first, seem disconnected can be karmically connected. After all, karma works on a spiritual level which may manifest itself physically in a myriad of seemingly unrelated ways.
— Charbel Tadros
The spiritual life to me has always meant just one thing: feeling.
— Marty Rubin
The only real flesh was the flesh that existed in his imagination. Since, therefore, he regarded the flesh as an ideal abstraction, rather than as a physical fact, he had relied on his spiritual strength to subjugate it.
— Yukio Mishima
The Imperial Concubine was fully aware of her own beauty, and she tended to be attracted by any force, such as religion, that treated her beauty and her high rank as things of no value.
— Yukio Mishima
Contemplate for a moment hiking up a wild and rugged mountain. The mountain itself is a challenge, as well as the experience of beauty and danger. To reach the top, a person must persevere. The higher one goes up the mountain the more one can see of the landscape around. There is, in seeing an expansive view, a natural delight and exhilaration that anyone who makes the effort feels. This natural delight corresponds to the spiritual joy of gaining a higher perception of life. Mountains correspond to heaven. The delight of gaining an elevated view on a mountain is the reflection (correspondence) of spiritually gaining wisdom in one’s soul.
— Steve Sanchez, Rethinking Redemption
That window which connects youto the agony of other people;that’s your soul.Close that window and you are soulless. And a soulless man is vestigial.He hears but cannot listen. He sees but cannot notice.And everyone knows:when eyes and ears become jobless,We look for excuses.We hear angels and devils speak. We confabulate.We make up godsand lick their feet.—Superstitions
— Akif Kichloo, Poems That Lose
Sounds like you're trying to say that creation of new alternate worlds is a conscious decision.''I'm not trying to say it - I just said it.
— Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves, InterWorld
Ironically your greatest spiritual asset is what appears to be your greatest obstacle: your obsession with yourself. Today we live in the age of individualism. – Richard Harvey
— Richard Harvey
Your spiritual path is decided by your vision and accomplished by your consistency.
— Samuel T. Padmore, Invading the Kingdom of Darkness: Rescuing Families and Nations
I want to do the right things for the right reasons. Not because someone will judge or someone else will wonder. Not because of tradition or pressure. Not because I'm afraid or embarrassed to do anything else. And not because it's what people expect. I want to do his will. But that is what I struggle with most, knowing what his will really is. Not his will according to the Catholic Church, but his will.
— Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash
The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no one inside and no one outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is a world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.No, the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. "Lost in oneself" is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are."―from_Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious_
— Carl G. Jung