Spirituality Quote of the Week

Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds, and spirit outside the self.

-- Aldous Huxley

Fearmonger

Racism is about fear,
not about superiority.

If I'm racist against you,
it's because I'm afraid,
not because I think I'm better.

But that doesn't stop me
from convincing myself otherwise.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The ignorant work for their own profit; the wise work for the welfare of the world, without thought for themselves.

-- The Bhagavad Gita

Carrier of Blessings

Gratitude seems like such an odd little animal to me sometimes.

A hurricane swamps a woman's business in so much saltwater that it'll never dry out, and she's thankful nobody got hurt. A tornado grinds a man's house down to the concrete slab, and he's thankful nobody died. A sink hole opens its big fat mouth and swallows a woman's parents, their house, and both cars, and she's thankful it didn't happen the day before on Christmas when the whole family was there.

This is what gratitude does. It changes the way we see the shit in our lives. It focuses our eyes not on what went wrong but on what went right -- what could've gone wrong but didn't. It also reminds us that even the shit in our lives is temporary.

As for me, gratitude has also shown me there's value in pain. In fact, there are certain things -- valuable things -- that can only come to me through pain, but I have to watch for them or I'll miss them. When I see them, I say thank you.

Pain. A carrier of blessings.
Gratitude. A gift we give ourselves.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The representatives of God are seldom divine and the minions of Satan are never quite diabolical.

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The best thing I can give to others is to liberate myself from the common delusions and be, for myself and for them, free. Then grace can work in and through me for everyone.

-- Thomas Merton

Spirituality Quote of the Week

You are a spark of an Eternal Flame. You can hide the spark, but you can never destroy it.

-- Paramahansa Yogananda

Spirituality Quote of the Week

God cannot be known the way we know a tree, a scientific fact or a book. God can only be known as a fellow subject. That's a reciprocal knowing, where we "know as fully as we are known."

-- Richard Rohr

Spirituality Quote of the Week

One of the most damaging ideas our culture perpetrates is the idea that we cannot trust ourselves or our perceptions. We are raised to doubt ourselves, to seek outside validation for our perceptions, to assume that someone other than ourselves can tell us our truth more clearly than we can tell ourselves.

-- Julia Cameron

Spirituality Quote of the Week

No man has learned to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Compassion, if nurtured, will eventually win out over even the most inhumane structures.

-- Kent Nerburn

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The nonverbal, concrete world contains no classes and no symbols which signify or mean anything other than themselves. Consequently it contains no duality. For duality arises only when we classify, when we sort our experiences into mental boxes, since a box is no box without an inside and an outside.

-- Alan Watts