Quotes About Spirituality

Drug-taking, it is significant, plays an important part in almost every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues.

I drank to the imminent of His Coming, he repeated, with a sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent; but the eyebrow continued to haunt him, and the Coming, as far as he was concerned, was horribly remote.

All too many Christians have behaved as though the devil were a first principle, on the same footing as god. They have paid more attention to evil and the problem of its eradication than to good and the methods by which individual goodness may be deepened, and the sum of goodness increased.

Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion.

O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee. Hans Denk

Turning to God without turning from self' - the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion.

Love is the plummet as well as the astrolabe of God's mysteries, and the pure in heart can see far down into the depths of the divine justice, to catch a glimpse, not indeed of the details of the cosmic process, but at least of its principle and nature. These insights permit them to say [...] that all shall be well, that, in spite of time, all is well, and that the problem of evil has its solution in the eternity, which men can, if they so desire, experience, but can never describe.

Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!

Man is a double being and can take, now the god's-eye view of things, now the brute's-eye view.

It is because we don't know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, and sometime criminal ways that are so characteristically human.

She knows too that this temple isn't what she still like to think it is - the house of Buddha. She knows it's just a diagram of her own unconscious mind.

Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.

This state of 'no-mind' exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit.

The choice of self-abandonment in suffering makes possible the reception of grace - grace on the spiritual level, in the form of an accession of the love and knowledge of God, and grace in the mental and physiological levels, in the form of a diminution of fear, self-concern and even of pain.

modo de hacerlo por sí mismo. Ése es el sentido, supongo, del ritual tibetano: alguien que esté ahí sentado todo el tiempo y diciéndonos qué es qué.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley Brave New World (Harper Perennial Modern Classics 1998) Originally published 1932.

La visión de aquel rostro transfigurado era a la vez una acusación y un irónico recordatorio de su propio aislamiento. Bernard se sentía ahora tan desdichadamente aislado como cuando había empezado el Servicio; más aislado a causa de su vaciedad no llenada, de su saciedad mortal. Separado y fuera de la armonía, en tanto que los otros se fundían en el Ser Más Grande.

El afán de trascender del autoconsciente es, como he dicho, un principal apetito del alma.

Todas las ventajas del cristianismo y del alcohol; y ninguno de sus inconvenientes.

far loro perdere la fede nella felicità come Bene Sovrano e far loro credere, viceversa, che la meta è comunque altrove, in qualche punto al di fuori della presente sfera umana; che il fine della vita non è il mantenimento del benessere, ma qualche intensificazione della coscienza, qualche accrescimento del sapere.

Havia uma coisa chamada Céu. Mas, apesar de tudo, bebiam enormes quantidades de álcool.

Every individual being, from the atom up to the most highly organized of living bodies and the most exalted of finite minds, may be thought of [...] as a point where a ray of the primordial Godhead meets one of the differentiated, creaturely emanations of that same Godhead's creative energy.

Then you think there is no God?" "No, I think there quite probably is one." "Then why? …" Mustapha Mond checked him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now …" "How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage. "Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all.

Spiritual progress is through the growing knowledge of the self as nothing and of the Godhead as all-embracing Reality. (Such knowledge, of course, is worthless if it is merely theoretical; to be effective, it must be realized as an immediate, intuitive experience and appropriately acted upon.)