If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.
Teach us to number our days aright.
Everything that happens in life is there to aid our spiritual growth.
All human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach.
In and through community lies the salvation of the world.
The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else’s growth.
When any institution becomes large and compartmentalized, with departments and subdepartments, then the conscience of the institution will often become so fragmented and diluted as to be virtually nonexistent, and the organization becomes inherently evil.
We cannot be a source for strength unless we nurture our own strength.
I guess if you want to know one single thing I’m about, it’s that I’m against easy answers.
Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within.
If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.
An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one’s own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker’s world from the inside, step in inside his or her shoes.
If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.
When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.
Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.
To heal your body, you must first heal your spirit.
The will to grow is, in essence, the same phenomenon as love. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.
But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.
If we seek to be loved – if we expect to be loved – this cannot be accomplished; we will be dependent and grasping not genuinely loving.
The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.