Quotes About Spirituality

The condition of your soul will determine the condition of your life. Because it determines how you think, what you feel, and what you choose to do.

what we focus on shapes the soul—the mind, the will, the emotions.

Christianity is not a religion. it is a relationship with God.

There are realms of life where the concepts of sense and nonsense do not apply.

The only way to get what we truly need is to surrender our needs to God.

The body apologizes to the soul for its errors, and the soul asks forgiveness for squatting in the body without invitation.

and the creation, in the world and above the world, that once was at variance with itself, is knit together in friendship: and we ... are made to join in the angels' song, offering the worship of their praise.

Since with all my soul I behold the face of my beloved, therefore all the beauty of his form is seen in me.

Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.

Moses' vision of God began with light; afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.

Father George Paulsen said to me, "Most of us have been in the same boat. Most of us find that the sins of our days are the sins of our lives. And the worst thing we can do is let our shame or our pride keep us from asking forgiveness every time we must." And then he said, "The fact that Jesus will always forgive you finally becomes the prod. One day, you realize that you are tired of this confession, tired of this sin; on that day, you'll decide you truly want it gone.

6Buscad a Jehová mientras puede ser hallado, llamadle en tanto que está cercano.

Once we got closer to the origins of these Eastern practices, we found that the monks and swamis were just as dogmatic and paternalistic, just as literal and conservative in their approach to spirituality as the Christian priests and ministers we were trying to get away from.

The upside of approaching spiritual practices like an experiment is that there can be no failure, only different outcomes. Whatever happens, you will learn about yourself and your relationship with the divine along the way.

The pre-rational view of spirituality is irrational because it is based on pre-rational worldviews, such as the magical, the belief that individual thoughts and actions directly influence the outside world ("If I dance, it will rain"); and the mythical, which is belief in unverified dogma, a worldview that usually includes a belief in an external power that can be asked to change outcomes ("If I pray to Jesus, he will intervene in my life").

The yogic scriptures paint a picture of perfection, and perfection can be your aim, but I can tell you sad stories about myself and others who have entered into a state of premature holiness with unpleasant consequences.

For more than twenty years, I have been seeking a way to be both rational and spiritual. I have been looking for a ray of hope in an otherwise-compartmentalized world in which people segregate religious aspirations and rationality in the hope of not having to resolve the glaring gap between the two. It's a gap that seems almost impossible to bridge, but I refuse to accept that disparity.

I say we make our voices heard. For us, for our kids, I say that it is time to figure out a new approach to spirituality, one that honors rationality.

What is it about spirituality that doesn't resonate with our core value of being rational? What makes it so difficult for us to maintain our level-headed (and slightly jaded) mindset while being spiritual at the same time?

And yet there is something there. People of faith share a camaraderie that is hard to reproduce in other social circumstances, and they often display a cheerful, albeit oddly naïve, attitude.

For a number of people, church attendance seems to be primarily a social affair, the act of meeting other people outside of the pressures of work. For others it is pure business/politics. I get it. It's important to have access to a community like the one a church provides.

In an ideal world, both experifaith and storyfaith would provide spiritual aspirants of all faiths with guidance. Storyfaith would preserve tradition and teach morals through parables and examples. Experifaith would provide the blueprint for a personal path to follow. In the context of chocolate, storyfaith is a lecture about chocolate, including information about origins and fables about positive attributes, while experifaith is the literal act of tasting the chocolate.

Western spiritual seekers began picking and choosing from Eastern philosophies based on their preferences. Wanting to get away from myth and dogma, they mixed and matched, shook and stirred, mashed and meshed, blended and juiced . . . and in the process, well, they lost their way. They created a number of philosophical inconsistencies.

Walk into any church, and you will see people swimming in a sea of emotions (everything from shame and guilt to love and ecstasy). That may be the reason some people think that the more emotional they are, the more spiritual they are. But, as we will explore later in the book, undiluted spirituality has little to do with emotions, and what little it does have has more to do with emotional growth than feelings of elation.