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...
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...
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.
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...
Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Your reasoning is fine, but your experience is limited. Enlarge your experience, and your philosophy will be different.
The motions of the average mind, say the Hindus, are about as orderly as those of a crazed monkey cavorting in its cage. Nay, more; like the prancings of a drunk, crazed monkey. Even so we have not co...
The last is the worship of God in innumerable forms. Each is a symbol that points to something beyond; and as none exhausts God’s actual nature, the entire array is needed to complete the picture of G...
Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.
Religion arose out of celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for collective expression.
Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
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...
If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact...