Quotes About Spirituality

All he would tell me is that the experience, which took place in his meditation practice, acquainted him with "something way, way beyond a material worldview that I can't really talk to my colleagues about, because it involves metaphors or assumptions that I'm really uncomfortable with as a scientist.

We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

Mysticism," he likes to say, "is the antidote to fundamentalism.

When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.

There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.

Taloma] offered prayers for us and for our troubled country and world. She invoked the spirit of the cactus in teaching us how to heal ourselves and how, once healed, we could better help to heal others. We are our own best healers," she said. What came next? Taloma spoke of the ripples in water and how far they could travel. She prayed for us to become ripples of healing, traveling out from this room to repair the world before it was too late.

The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.

The usual antonym for the word "spiritual" is "material." That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical.

free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment

Cheese is all about the dark side of life - Sister Noella; aka The Cheese Nun

Compared with many scientists—or for that matter many spiritual types—Roland Griffiths possesses a large measure of what Keats, referring to Shakespeare, described as "negative capability," the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality.

the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.

I joked to my wife as she drove me home that I felt as if I had been repeatedly sucked into the asshole of God.

The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure.

savikalpa samadhi, in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the universe during the course of a meditation on an object—in this case, planet Earth.

The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.

Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

Alcoholism can be understood as a spiritual disorder, Ross told me the first time we met, in the treatment room at NYU. Over time you lose your connection to everything but this compound. Life loses all meaning. At the end, nothing is more important than that bottle, not even your wife and your kids. Eventually, there is nothing you won't sacrifice for it.

the church, with communities in nine

Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives. By

There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.

and spirituality. I asked him if he agreed with E. O. Wilson, who has written that all of us must ultimately choose: either the path of science or the path of spirituality