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.
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.
The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what’s there: all of it.
Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.
Creation is a process that is still happening and we’re in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God.
Heartbreaks, disappointments and even our own weaknesses can serve as stepping-stones to the second half of life transformation. Failings are the foundation for growth. Those who have fallen, failed or ‘gone down’ are the only ones who understand ‘up.’
Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.
Once you experience being loved when you are unworthy, being forgiven when you did something wrong, that moves you into non-dual thinking. You move from what I call meritocracy, quid pro quo thinking, to the huge ocean of grace, where you stop counting or calculating.
Prayer is looking out from a different set of eyes, which are not comparing, competing, judging, labeling or analyzing, but receiving the moment in its present wholeness and unwholeness. That is what is meant by contemplation.
There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it’s enough.
There is a part of you that is Love itself, and that is what we must fall into. It is already there. Once you move your identity to that level of deep inner contentment, you will realize you are drawing upon a Life that is much larger than your own and from a deeper abundance.
God comes to us disguised as our life.