Quotes About Spirituality

The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.

Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Marriage] is the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is.

The image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience.

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.

enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact...

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of the self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state

You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.

Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals.

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.   The god you worship is the god you deserve.

God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.

The ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond Human experience

The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in.

You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.

When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he'd address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you're addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you're in, then you're in your place in the world. It's a different way to live.

It's important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.

The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.

But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.