Quote of the Week #67 - Fishing

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

--Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Week #66 - Dream Luminosity

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky…This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above the earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going.

In recent dreams, I have twice seen light so brilliant, so intense, that it “woke me up,” but the light did not continue into wakefulness. Which was more real, the waking or the dream?

-- Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River

Quote of the Week #65 - God is the Consciousness in Life

The purpose is to identify not with the body which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from my myths. Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is the vehicle? If you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go like an old car. There goes the fender, etc. But it’s expected: and then gradually the whole thing drops off and consciousness rejoins consciousness. I live with these myths – and they tell me to do this, to identify with the Christ or the Shiva in me. And that doesn’t die, it resurrects. It is an essential experience of any mystical realization that you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify with the consciousness in life – and that is the god.

--Joseph Campbell

Quote of the Week #64 - A Peaceful Mind Free From All Thought Constructs

By concentrating on the lotus of the heart, there arises a state of sorrowless joy which is infused with inner light; upon its emergence, such a state anchors the mind to a peaceful flow free from all thought constructs.

--Yoga Sutra 1:36, Samadhi Pada, expanded by Vyasa, as interpreted and translated by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait in The Secret of the Yoga Sutra; Samadhi Pada

Quote of the Week #63 - Two Sides of Being Alone

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

-- Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

Quote of the Week #62 - What You Do About It

Life happens. Life is ten percent what happened to you, is ninety percent what you do about it.

--Steve Harvey, Stayer University TV Commercial

Quote of the Week #61 - Universal Hitching

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

--John Muir

Quote of the Week #60 - Our Human Birthright

There will never be an end to this work of making things better, because it is our human birthright to make things worse and to make them better.

--Zoketsu Norman Fischer, “The Problem of Evil”, Shambhala Sun magazine, May 2015

Quote of the Week #59 - The Perspective of Infinity

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

--Fred Rogers, Dartmouth College Commencement, 2002

Quote of the Week #58 - Reality is a Sound

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

-- Anne Carson

Quote of the Week #57 - Scripture, Myth and Concentration on Spiritual Matters

Religion has attempted in the past to dogmatise on Cosmology. But wiser theologians always recognized that when Scripture tells us stories telling HOW creation happened, these must be understood as Myths, that is the attempt to describe a spiritual requirement in seemingly historical terms. For example, the creation myth about God making the world in six days and resting on the seventh is a way of teaching that Man, created in the image of God, needs to rest once a week from all earthly matters to concentrate on spiritual matters.

--Bill Heilbronn, from The Courage of Uncertainty; A Jewish View of the Continuing Evolution of Faith in the Fields of Religion and Science