Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel.
Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.
Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.
Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.
Da Free John's phrase kept running through my mind: "Practice the wound of love. . . practice the wound of love. " Real love hurts; real love makes you totally vulnerable and open; real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you. I kept thinking, if love does not shatter you, you do not know love.
The very desire to seek spiritual enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The 'perfect practice' is therefore not to search for enlightenment but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already are enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit.
I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.
Communistic evolution, according to the Senate committee that examined it, is responsible for 135 million deaths in peacetime. There's no religion that has a tiny fraction of that many deaths on its conscience. There are scientists who will admit that there's not one iota of scientific evidence to support it.
Americans think their danger is terrorists. They don't understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. . . . The terrorists are not anything like the threat we face from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. . . . The American constitutional system is near to being overthrown
Finding the right healing path requires all or nothing. Once you place conditions on healing, all you can achieve is conditional healing.
Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.