Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.
We live in a fantastic century. I brush aside the incredible discoveries of science, and the razor’s edge between doom and fulfillment onto which they have pushed us, to speak of the new situation amo...
We are limited in joy, knowledge, and being, the three things people really want.
We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.
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...
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.
Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his unde...
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...
Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they en...
All the basic principles of Bhakti yoga are richly exemplified in Christianity. From the Hindu point of view, Christianity is one great brilliantly lit highway toward God, not greater than other paths...
A sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse, A difficult path is this—the poets declare!2 Science
To find meaning in the mystery of existence is life’s final and fascinating challenge.
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...
Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.
How can such a love for Being be engendered? The things for the world clamor for our affection so incessantly that it may be marveled that Being who can neither be seen nor heard can ever become their...
He renamed India’s untouchables harijan, God’s people, and raised them to human stature. And in doing so he provided the nonviolent strategy as well as the inspiration for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s co...
He is admitting that he is trapped, which realization leads to his desperate cry that we have already quoted, Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Romans 14:24). In whatever words it is the cr...
For what the soul is to the body of man, Saint Augustine was to write, that the Holy Spirit is to the Body of Christ, which is the Church.
Dismiss these post facto accounts as legends if we must; there is no question but that in his life as the Buddha the springs of tenderness gushed abundant. Wanting to draw the arrows of sorrow from ev...