The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and desc...
For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't rea...
Mary had been chosen, “favored” by God. But what a strange blessing. It brought with it none of the ideals or goals that so consume our daily striving. Today many assume that those whom God favors will enjoy the things we equate with a good life:...
It seems - and who so astonished as they? - that they had held back material facts; that they were guilty of both suppressio veri and suggestio falsi (well-known gods against whom they often offended); further, that they were malignant in their dispo...
You will be doing your students a much greater service by reducing the amount of material that you are covering and actually ensuring that students are learning it, rather than making sure that you are ticking off everyone checkpoint in your ideal sy...
In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created mus...
I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men—for certain people—to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has b...
There is yet another class that, having found that their own religion not only prevents free thinking but that some of its philosophies are also against some basic social, economic and scientific concepts of life as required by the progressive societ...
All right, the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is th...
But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowled...
One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of the scientific establishment seem genuinely amazed that the citizens do not accept finch-beak variation as proof of the claim that humans, like all an...
As students grow more and more accustomed to assuming materialism and naturalism in their academic work, the concept of creation by God gradually tends to become less real to them. It is not so much that any single finding undermines their faith; rat...
So,' he said. 'What do you think of it?' She twisted towards the fire and watched the flames behind the blackened furnace door. 'When I hear a piece like that,' she said, 'I find it hard to believe that there isn't something more than this.' She wave...
It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the mater...
It's quiet in the car, in a good way for once. No words, no music. Silence seems right. I roll down the windows and lean my head against the door frame, listening to the wind rush by and smelling the pine trees. I watch the stars materialize, like so...
Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess. A half-good sex scene is not half as hot; it actually moves into the negative numbers, drai...
I will be satisfied to the extent that I see everything I have as a gift from God. Here is the truth: Everything you have – your money, talent, friendships, marriage, children, material possessions, health, home, bike, car, even the country you liv...
Although Geoffrey, Gilbert and I grew up in this small place in Africa, we did many of the same things children do all over the world, only with slightly different materials. And talking with friends I've met from America and Europe, I now know this ...
Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the ...
We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsible within...
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material f...
