Quotes About Spirituality

Jesus points to this when he says, "Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole."1 The New Testament's "Be ye perfect" is a mistranslation of the original Greek word, which means whole. This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are—with or without the pain-body.

There is no substitute for finding true purpose. But the true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found on the outer level. It does not concern what you do but what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.

And then one day, you too disappear. Your armchair is still there. But instead of you sitting in it, there is just an empty space. You went back to where you came from just a few years ago.

You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.

It is everywhere, not just in places where people don't have enough, but even more so where they have more than enough. Is that surprising? No. The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.

When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness. It is that awareness that says I AM

Solamente lo eterno de nosotros puede reconocer la temporalidad de lo temporal

Death is the stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to die before you die -- and find that there is no death.

In the egoic state, love gets confused with form, and so you think your love is in this form, in this other person. You don't realize that true love is the recognition of the formless in the other - which is the recognition of yourself in the other.

Coming from Being, you will perceive another person's body and mind as just a screen, as it were, behind which you can feel their true reality, as you feel yours. So, when confronted with someone else's suffering or unconscious behavior, you stay present and in touch with Being and are thus able to look beyond the form and feel the other person's radiant and pure Being through your own.

How spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe, but everything to do with your state of consciousness.

The voice in the head that never stops speaking becomes a civilization that is obsessed with form and therefore knows nothing of the most important dimension of human existence: the sacred, the stillness, the formless, the divine.

And then, just when you thought you made it or that you belong here, the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you begin to die, people who were a part of your world. Then your physical form weakens; your sphere of influence shrinks. Instead of becoming more, you now become less, and the ego reacts to this with increasing anxiety or depression.

just as without silence there could be no sound, you would not exist without the vital formless dimension that is the essence of who you are.

Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment. It is a doorway out of the prison that is the ego.

A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking.

Whenever death occurs, whenever a life form dissolves, God, the formless and unmanifested, shines through the opening left by the dissolving form.

Doing is never enough if you neglect Being. The ego knows nothing of Being but believes you will eventually be saved by doing. If you are in the grip of the ego, you believe that by doing more and more you will eventually accumulate enough 'doings' to make yourself feel complete at some point in the future. You won't. You will only lose yourself in doing. The entire civilization is losing itself in doing that is not rooted in Being and thus becomes futile.

I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats. Even ducks have taught me important spiritual lessons. Just watching them is a meditation.

true love, which has no opposite because it arises from beyond the mind.

The Now is also central to the teaching of Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam. Sufis have a saying: "The Sufi is the son of time present." And Rumi, the great poet and teacher of Sufism, declares: "Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire." Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century spiritual teacher, summed it all up beautifully: "Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.

So the single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

When you awaken, nature awakens, too.

The thinking mind cannot understand Presence