Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandat...
Whether things turn out for the better depends on what we do. We ought not spend our time masterminding the future, but recognize our marching orders: to do the best we can for history and the planet.
Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome th...
Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.
He who does the task Dictated by duty, Caring nothing For the fruit of the action, He is a yogi. (Bhagavad-Gita, VI:I) Hence
Just as a man carrying on his head a load of wood that has caught fire would go rushing to a pond to quench the flames, even so will the seeker of truth, scorched by the fires of life—birth, death, se...
Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?
We all carry it within us: supreme strength the fullness of wisdom unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted and cannot be destroyed.
With mind distracted, never thinking, Death is coming,To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116)trans by Robert Thurman
Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.
Religion is the call to confront reality to master the self.
The faith I was born into formed me.
Without attention, the human sense of wonder and the holy will stir occasionally, but to become a steady flame it must be tended.
Among the languages of American Indians there is no word for ‘art,’ because for Indians everything is art.
Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to...
Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to ho...
It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.
And it was from a Hindu, Swami Satprakashananda with his Christmas talks on Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that I received the strongest confirmation—by an outside examiner, as it were—of Jesus’s divin...
God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. It's...
A nation can assume that the phrase under God in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God.