We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying...
I really knew nothing about the dancing habits of the Scottish. But I wanted to help. "I could teach them Indian folk dances," I offered, scrounging my mind for school dances in gaudy garments. "Well, I'm not sure that they would be complex enough fo...
In order to align your life choices with your values, you will need to inquire about the effects of your actions (and inactions) on yourself and others. Although we are always stumbling upon new knowledge that shifts our choices and life direction, b...
Self-evident, Sharif Basha thinks, laying down his pen. So self-evident as to be hardly worth saying. But Anna does not think so. Anna, when she sees a wrong, she cannot rest until it has been put right. Besides, she wants to make him happy. Not just...
Delirious as it can be, sex is only one kind of intimacy, and yet has become the cultural catchment area for all kinds of needs because our understanding of intimacy is so poor. Brutal work schedules, related geographic isolation, and the concomitant...
Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they...
The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not...
I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain. For there is nothing, from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering to the loftiest acme of pain, to which...
For a Siddhar yogi, time is precious. It is important to utilize every moment to evolve into ever higher states of consciousness. We understand stagnancy as decay and for growth, we constantly discard the old to welcome change as the new. We tap into...
People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we mig...
Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million peop...
Yet the human heart is disheartened by the most unreasonable self-judgments, because even when we take on giants, we too often confuse failure with fault, which I know too well. The only way back from such a bleak despondency is to shape humiliation ...
I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consignin...
He was telling her here, in this cellar, as he kissed her feet, he had understood love for the first time - not just from other people's words, but in his heart, in his blood. She was dearer to him than all his past, dearer to him than his mother, th...
[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as ...
She had probably referred to herself as Mrs. Scott Landon less than half a dozen times in all the years of her married life, and never once during the twenty-six months of her widowhood. It wasn't hard to understand why she had done so now. It was wh...
Atheism is a conclusion reached by the most reasonable methods and one which is not asserted dogmatically but is explained in its every feature by the light of reason. The atheist does not boast of knowing in a vainglorious, empty sense. He understan...
If you've ever been trapped in a conversation with someone with whom you weren't interested, you'll understand how uncomfortable it can be. Imagine this happening to you several times a day, almost every day, for many years. Wouldn't you recognize th...
It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust a...
But what slayed Robert was that for all these years, all his adult life, he'd never believed in relationships and commitment. They were highly overrated as far as he was concerned. Some people's entire lives revolved around love...finding it, keeping...
I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a dif...
