1. 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.
2. Christianity is a lifestyle – a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established “religion” (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one’s “personal Lord and Savior” . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.
3. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
4. If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.
5. All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody
6. Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise.
7. The most common one-liner in the Bible is, “Do not be afraid.” Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.
8. Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.
9. Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.
10. The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what’s there: all of it.
11. You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.
12. There are three things we have to let go of. The first is the compulsion to be successful. Second, is the compulsion to be right-especially theologically right. (That’s merely an ego trip, and because of this “need” churches split in half, with both parties prisoners of their own egos.) Finally, there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.
13. Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.
14. 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.’
15. Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of “Christian” countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I’m afraid.
16. A good teacher teaches people how to see, not what to see.
17. God comes to us disguised as our life.
18. The people who know God well – the mystics, the hermits, those who risk everything to find God – always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found to be an abusive father or a tyrannical mother, but always a lover who is more than we dared hope for. How different than the “account manager” that most people seem to worship. God is a lover who receives and forgives everything.
19. The simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it’s the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don’t love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won’t have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it’s not a technique at all. It’s precisely the refusal of all technique.
20. The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.
21. 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.
22. Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity; Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God
23. 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.
24. God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.
25. Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you’re in your mind, you’re hardly ever at peace, and when you’re at peace, you’re never only in your mind.
26. It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.
27. The cross is the standing statement of what we do to one another and to ourselves. The resurrection is the standing statement of what God does to us in return.
28. Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.
29. You come to God not by being strong, but by being weak; not by being right, but through your mistakes.
30. The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.
31. I am who I am in the eyes of God- nothing more and nothing less.
32. Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.
33. There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it’s enough.
34. Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!
35. You cannot heal what you cannot acknowledge.
36. People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
37. Spirituality is about being ready. All the spiritual disciplines of your life – prayer, study, meditation or ritual, religious vows – are there so you can break through to the eternal. Spirituality is about awakening the eyes, the ears, the heart so you can see what’s always happening right in front of you.
38. Faith is so rare-and religion so common-because no one wants to live between first base and second base. Faith is the in-between space where you’re not sure you’ll make it to second base. You’ve let go of one thing and haven’t yet latched into another. Most of us choose the security of first base.
39. Jesus liberated us from religion. Jesus taught simple religious practices over major theorizing.
The only thoughts Jesus told us to police were our own: our own negative thoughts, our own violent thoughts, our own hateful thoughts-not other people’s thoughts.
40. Everything has to be understood in opposition to something else. For some dang reason, the ego prefers to make one side better than the other, so we choose. And we decide males are better than females, America is better than Canada, Democrats are better than Republicans. And for most people, once this decision is made, it is amazing the amount of blindness they become capable of. They really don’t see what’s right in front of them. Once you see this, it’s an amazing breakthrough, and that is the starting place for moving away from dualistic thinking.
41. Most Christian ‘believers’ tend to echo the cultural prejudices and worldviews of the dominant group in their country, with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor.
42. Either you allow Holy Scriptures to change you, or you will normally try to use it to change–and clobber–other people. It is the height of idolatry to use the supposed Word of God so that my small self can be in control and be right. But I am afraid this has been more the norm than the exception in the use of the Bible.
43. The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.
44. 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.
45. When you haven’t found inner meaning, you will always substitute outer performance. It’s the only way to fill that void, that sense of significance – that I am significant. So almost the degree of outer performance can, in many cases, mirror the lack of inner alignment.
46. Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us.
47. The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
48. Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
49. Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.
50. Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.
51. every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.
52. If unconditional love, loyalty, and obedience are the tickets to an eternal life, then my black Labrador, Venus, will surely be there long before me, along with all the dear animals in nature who care for their young at great cost to themselves and have suffered so much at the hands of humans.
53. To give, and not demand that others receive . . . that is the crossover point to maturity
54. All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.
55. The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine – that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they’re talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.
56. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
57. God comes to you disguised as your life.
58. It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually.
59. The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.
60. When you get your,’Who am I?’, question right, all of your,’What should I do?’ questions tend to take care of themselves
