If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!
Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. What an enigma!
God resists our evil and conquers it with good, or how could God ask the same of us?! Think about that. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure. Love is not love unless it is totally free. Grace is not grace unless it is totally free. You would think Christian people would know that by now, but it is still a secret of the soul.
We ended up spreading our national cultures under the rubric of Jesus, instead of a universally liberating message under the name of Christ.
We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.
You never become humble except through fully accepting humiliations – usually many times.
We actually respond to one another’s energy more than to people’s exact words or actions. In any situation, your taking or giving of energy is what you are actually doing. Everybody can feel, suffer, or enjoy the difference, but few can exactly say what it is that is happening. Why do I feel drawn or repelled? What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.
In many ways what we’re seeing as we explore the Bible is an observing of the development of human consciousness and human readiness for God. That’s why we do see some difference between the earlier and later Scriptures: There’s been a development in consciousness. In.
I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For.
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.