Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor Quotes

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[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which ...

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of...

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept ...

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor