The game can be won or lost, but not the player himself. If he has worked hard, he has improved his game and indeed his faculties; this happens in defeat fully as much as in victory. As the contestant...
In samadhi, the mind continues to think, but of no thing. This does not mean that it is thinking of nothing, that it is a total blank. It has perfected the paradox of seeing the invisible. It is fille...
After all our time living together, my identity is not self-contained: I am the way I am because she is the way she is. This marriage of true minds Shakespeare spoke of does not occur at the wedding n...
When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states.
There are worse kinds of infidelity than the sexual. I was living with one of the most interesting women in the world, and too often my attention was elsewhere.
The only thing that is unqualifiedly good is extended vision, the enlargement of one’s understanding of the ultimate nature of things.
Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?
God has made different religions to suit different aspirations, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one foll...
Emerson argued that the whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible, and they are. They want awakening, [and for that purpose they need teachers] to get the sou...
First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this—the poets declare!2 Science
The point of the story is that the universe is one gigantic Wishing Tree, with branches that reach into every heart. The cosmic process decrees that sometime or other, in this life or another, each of...
The creative quietude of philosophical Taoism means to align one’s daily life to the Tao, to ride its boundless tide and delight in its flow…and to perfect a life of wu wei- pure effectiveness and cre...
Derived from the root s-l-m, which means primarily peace but in a secondary sense surrender, its full connotation is the peace that comes when one’s life is surrendered to God. This makes Islam—togeth...
Building upon this early conception of the Church, Christians came to think of it as having a double aspect. Insofar as it consists of Christ and the Holy Spirit dwelling in people and suffusing them...
The ultimate truth is that nirvana is not infinitely distant but infinitely near, reaching gracefully toward us, as it were, and being the ground on which we already stand if we but knew this. Only th...
Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.
Religiously conceived, the human opportunity is to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light.
I had not yet gotten around to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson’s Consilience. When I did read it, I discovered on page 286 that people follow religion because it is easier than empiricism. That struck...