Quotes About Growth

Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will only see what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. . . . So we must stumble and fall, I'm sorry to say.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE As

Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature

there is an early stage "holiness" that looks like the real thing, but it isn't.

God has no grandchildren. God only has children," as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.

Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or "resurrection." This is the "pattern that connects" and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him — or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves — us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.

Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

We become what we are willing to see.

Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, "No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk.

The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

As physicist Albert Einstein frequently said in a different way: No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in—but only to be moved out from.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

Until and unless there is a person, situation, event, idea, conflict, or relationship that you cannot "manage," you will never find the True Manager. So, God makes sure that several things will come your way that you cannot manage on your own.

A.A. is the only group I know that is willing and honest enough to just tell people up front, "You are damn selfish!" Or, "Until you get beyond your massive narcissism you are never going to grow up.

Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.

Organized religion is an accountability system that holds your feet to the fire long enough to know what the issues really are, who God might just be, and what your own limitations might also be.