Quote collection
107 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality."
"We become compassionate not from altruism which denies the self for the sake of the other, but from the insight that sees and feels one is the other."
"I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions, and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find, and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith."
"Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation."
"...like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to God. ...the directions that appeared to lead away from Christianity led me deeper into it."
"If you are drilling for water, it's better to drill one 60-foot well than 10 6-foot wells."
"Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods."
"A religion made up solely of heightened religious experiences would not be a religion at all. ...The major religious traditions address the mysteries (with or without entheogens), but they have other business to do: widen understanding, give meaning, provide solace, promote loving-kindness, and connect human being to human being."
"Ancient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric."
"Entheogens are not to be lightly trifled with... However, if taken with the right attitude and in the proper setting, psychoactive drugs may produce religious experiences. ...it is far less clear that they can produce religious lives."
"As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this."
"Not only is the destiny of the individual bound up with the entire Church; it is responsible for helping to sanctify the entire world of nature and history."
"...the single destination of sanctity could admit of so many different avenues leading to it."
"When there are miles to go before we sleep, altered traits are more important than altered states."
"As human beings we are made to surpass ourselves and are truly ourselves only when transcending ourselves."
"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."
"One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else."
"In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be."
"Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us."
"So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues."