We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.
Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve “the problem of evil,” yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the “problem of good.” How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.
Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.
It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD.
The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.
The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.
Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.
People who have been initiated “broke through in what felt like breaking down”.
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.
The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.