Such growth will move humans into ever-higher energy states, ultimately transforming our bodies into spiritual form and uniting this dimension of existence with the afterlife dimension, ending the cycle of birth and death.
All spiritual strength for ourselves, all noble ties to one another, have their real source in that inner sanctuary where God denies His lonely audience to none. Its secrets are holy; its asylum, inviolate; its consolations, sure; and all are open to the simple heart-word, "Thou art my hiding-place.
No distinction seems to be more obvious than that between spiritual and temporal matters. Yet whenever they have been made objects of Legislation, they have clashed and contended with each other, till one or the other has gained the supremacy.
In the spiritual life nowhere do our ideals meet the actual more truly than in how we relate to each other, in how we make, sustain and are friends.
To-day the whole Christian world prostrates itself in adoration around the crib of Bethlehem and rehearses in accents of love a history which precedes all time and will endure throughout eternity. As if by an instinct of our higher, spiritual nature, there well up from the depths of our hearts, emotions which challenge the power of human expression. We seem to be lifted out of the sphere of natural endeavor to put on a new life and to stretch forward in desire to a blessedness which, though not palpable, is eminently real.
A remarkable tour de force that will hopefully end forever the argument that science and the spiritual are opposed to one another. This wonderful collection of facts and arguments, written in a good-natured, almost conversational style, makes it easy to loosen yourself from your preconceptions and enjoy seeing reality more clearly and completely. We have needed such a book for a long time.
A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures.
I was raised a Catholic as a boy and went to a Catholic boys' high school, a private school, and kind of drifted away, candidly, in my latter teen years. I consider myself deeply spiritual but not in an institutional, religious kind of a way. In Catholicism, we're surrounded by these images of martyrdom and doing penance and doing some suffering to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And I certainly embedded that in my psyche and I have lived that very effectively.
Meditation is the nourishment for flowering.
Meditation is that dimension of science which focuses on creating the right kind of interior, so that you can live a peaceful and joyous life.
If you have no agenda of your own, life will work according to its agenda. Your personal agenda is taking you further and further away from that.
When meditation makes you realize that you have so many limitations of your own and they are all created by you, the longing to break them will come.
Without raising human consciousness, whatever we do in the world will only lead to more and more suffering.
Only in unawareness you are mortal. In awareness you are immortal.
Meditation does not mean you have to grin every moment of your life, but to learn to let your bones smile.
If you look at creation the way it is, it is explosively beautiful.
Devotion is the spark that can fire up your chemistry and energy to such a level that it creates an explosion of ecstasy within you.
Now, you believe you are a material person dabbling with. But essentially, you are a spiritual being dabbling with the material world means you have started seeing life with utmost clarity. There are no more illusions about it. You see everything just the way it is.
Being on the spiritual path means you want to be a success in an existential sphere, not just on a social level.
When every moment, you experience yourself as the source of creation, not as a piece of creation, then you are realized.
There is only one calamity: ignorance. And there is only one solution: enlightenment.
Knowing yourself has to always come from within. The outside can inspire or guide you, but knowing has to come from within you.
Meditation means ultimate freedom within you.
To the ideal of high consumption and the downgrading of spiritual values corresponds a conception of injustice that centers exclusively on the problem of consumption; and equality in consumption cannot be achieved except by violence.
I think you can't really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child, whether it's New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can't escape it, even if you completely disagree with it, you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.
