In the Sermon on the Mount it’s quite clear that these are the three great barriers we have to overcome to understand Jesus and the Reign of God. But in Christianity we have always been concerned with ecclesiological questions, sacramental questions, sacerdotal questions, and, needless to say, sexual questions – questions that Jesus practically never bothered with.
Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.
As physicist Albert Einstein frequently said in a different way: No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place.
Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is “simple and beautiful;” as Einstein said great truth would always have to be.
Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in – but only to be moved out from.
They’ve gotten so used to these gatherings not being meaningful that they no longer know how to allow them to touch their heart or change their mind. The Holy Spirit is again the Missing Person of the Blessed Trinity.
The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God.
Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking, or how we process our reality.
We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.
As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.
The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: “Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.
Once we begin to learn the contemplative mind, we realize it is almost the natural way of seeing – and we have unlearned it! It is quite natural, as we see in children before the age of six or seven when they start judging and analyzing and distinguishing things one from another.
Without meaning we are surely less than human and deeply discontented. Most meaning is largely preconceptual and not subject to words, and in that sense it is nonrational, but meaning lies in wait to appear and grab onto the right symbol in the right moment.
Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don’t know love, when we don’t experience love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless.
But in this book, I use “prayer” as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.
At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love his own creation.
The opposite of contemplation is not action, it is reaction.
We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.
It seems that human beings cannot see what they are not readied to see. We cannot hear what we have not been prepared to hear. The “obvious” seems to have little correlation with our acceptance of it. We all have an amazing capacity for missing the point.
Your True Self is that part of you that knows who you are and whose you are, although largely unconsciously. Your False Self is just who you think you are – but thinking doesn’t make it so.