Quotes About Perception

You cannot know anything spiritually by saying it is a not-that : you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there.

The unprayerful heart will always twist reality to its own liking.

favorite metaphors. I love the image of fire, not for its seeming destructiveness, but as a natural symbol for transformation—literally, the changing of forms. Farmers, forestry workers, and Native peoples know that fire is a renewing force, even as it also can be destructive. We in the West tend to see it as merely destructive (which is probably why we did not understand the metaphors of hell or purgatory).

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.

Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.

God comes to you disguised as your life," as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

reality itself, our reality, my limited and sometimes misinterpreted experience, still becomes the revelatory place for God.

The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.

Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.

Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand!

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

What Richard does is more like what Jesus did when he spoke in parables: He takes you to see from one angle, and then backs up and brings you to see from another angle, and then another, and then another, until a whole new way of seeing begins to dawn on you.

The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. —Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212–1282)

Contemplation is really the change that changes everything—especially, first of all, the seer.

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

mystery isn't something that you cannot understand -- it is something that you can endlessly understand!

So many of us accept either a successful or a negative self-image inside of a system of false images to begin with!

Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else. This is why in John's Gospel, Jesus Christ makes the almost boastful statement "I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12). Jesus Christ is the amalgam of matter and spirit put together in one place, so we ourselves can put it together in all places, and enjoy things in their fullness. It can even enable us to see as God sees, if that is not expecting too

It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.

aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.

if making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another.

His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.

Maybe this was the unstated purpose of education, to get young people to see the world through the tired eyes of age: disappointment and exhaustion and defeat masquerading as wisdom.