Quotes About Spirituality

Te embarcaste, navegaste, arribaste. Desembarca. Si es a otra vida, nada está vacío de dioses, tampoco allí. Si es en la insensibilidad[212], dejarás de soportar sufrimientos y placeres, dejarás de ser esclavo para un recipiente tan inferior como superior es la parte que manda comparada con la que sirve, porque mandan la inteligencia y el espíritu divino mientras que son sirvientes la tierra y los despojos sanguinolentos.

What of it then? You embarked, you set sail, you made port. Go ashore now. It is to another life, nothing is empty of the gods, even on that shore.

and shalt respect thy mind only, and that divine part of thine, and this shall be thine only fear

To live with the gods." And to do that is to show them that your soul accepts what it is given and does what the spirit requires—the spirit God gave each of us to lead and guide us, a fragment of himself. Which is our mind, our logos.

as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air

God sees all our directing minds stripped of their material vessels, their husks and their dross. His contact is only between his own intelligence and what has flowed from him into these channels of ours. If you train yourself to do the same, you will be rid of what so much distracts you. Hardly likely, is it, that one blind to the enveloping flesh will spend his time eyeing clothes, houses, reputation, or any other such trappings and stage scenery?

A man who has put first his own mind and divinity, and worships the supremacy of the god within him, makes no drama of his life, no hand-wringing, no craving for solitude or crowds:

i. Nothing can happen to me that isn't natural. ii. I can keep from doing anything that God and my own spirit don't approve. No one can force me to.

I know the gods exist. . . .—from having felt their power, over and ove

It is a disgrace for the soul to be the first to succumb in that life in which the body does not succumb.

Nothing is more miserable than one who is always out and about, running around everything in circles and looking for signs and symptoms to divine his neighbor's minds. He doesn't realize that it is sufficient to concentrate solely on the divinity within himself and to give it true service.

The book of Proverbs makes the same point: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (14.31)

The first phrase affirms "God so loved the world"—not Christians in particular, or the elect, or the church, but the world. God's passion is the world. Christians have often been fearful of loving the world, for they have sometimes confused it with "worldliness." But loving the world doesn't mean getting lost in the world. It means loving the world—the creation—as God loves the world.

Jesus is, for us as Christians, the decisive revelation of what a life full of God looks like. Radically centered in God and filled with the Spirit, he is the decisive disclosure and epiphany of what can be seen of God embodied in a human life. As the Word and Wisdom and Spirit of God become flesh, his life incarnates the character of God, indeed, the passion of God. In him we see God's passion.

How can it be that God is known in only one religion—and then perhaps only in the "right" form of that religion?7

That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads—as if "believing the right things" is what God is most looking for, as if having "correct beliefs" is what will save us. And if you have "incorrect beliefs," you may be in trouble. It's remarkable to think that God cares so much about "beliefs.

The sacrifice that Christianity asks of us is not ultimately a sacrifice of the intellect.

God has always been in relationship to us, journeying with us, and yearning to be known by us.

In a time when traditional religious teachings have become suspect, we tend to trust that which can be known in our own experience. This turn to experience is seen in the remarkable resurgence of interest in spirituality within mainline churches and beyond. Spirituality is the experiential dimension of religion.

For Mark, it is about participation with Jesus and not substitution by Jesus.

In short, the portrait of Jesus as a Spirit person is history remembered and not simply history metaphorized. This is the basis for my claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic: for him, God was an experiential reality. He knew the immediacy of the sacred in his own experience. And this claim leads to a second claim: Jesus' experience of God was foundational for the rest of what he was.

Marcus Borg's book Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus.

Oberammergau in Bavaria.

To affirm that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God does not require affirming that he is the only, or only adequate, revelation of God. Christians have sometimes thought so.