Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
And it will be a hundred times better
for everyone.

Give up kindness, renounce morality,
And men will rediscover filial piety and
love.

Give up ingenuity, renounce profit,
And bandits and thieves will
disappear.

These three are outward forms alone;
they are not sufficient in themselves.
It is more important
To see the simplicity,
To realize one’s true nature,
To cast off selfishness
And temper desire.

— Laozi, “Tao Te Ching”

“When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

— Umberto Eco

“In the ancient cultural places of the world there was a temple, a church or a cathedral in its center. From there came the order of life. In every modern big city there is a bank building in its center. In my ‘Pied Piper’ I have tried to depict this as a kind of demon cult, where money is something to be prayed to like something sacred. It’s even being expressed there in words that it is ‘God’.”

— Michael Ende, “Michael Ende’s Last Words to the Japanese”

“If we contrast the vivid, poignant, shaking, peak-experience type religious or transcendental experience, which I have been describing, with the thoughtless, habitual, reflex-like, absent-minded, automatic responses which are dubbed ‘religious’ by many people, then we are faced with a universal, ‘existential’ problem. Familiarization and repetition produces a lowering of the intensity and richness of consciousness, even though it also produces preference, security, comfort, etc. Familiarization, in a word, makes it unnecessary to attend, to think, to feel, to live fully, to experience richly. This is true not only in the realm of religion but also in the realms of music, art, architecture, patriotism, even nature itself.”

— Abraham Maslow

“‘Stinking thinking’ is the universal addiction. All societies are addicted to themselves and create deep codependency. There are shared and agreed-upon addictions in every culture and every institution. These are often the hardest to heal — they do not look like addictions because we have all agreed to be compulsive about the same things and blind to the same problems. Some form of alternative consciousness is the only freedom from this self and from cultural lies.

If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking, which is invariably dualistic, the primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice (once just called ‘prayer’) to break down this unhelpful binary system of either-or thinking and superiority thinking. ‘Prayer’ is changing your operating system!

— Richard Rohr, “Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps”

“Spiritual awakening doesn’t happen because you master some spiritual technique. There are lots of skillful meditators who are not awake. Awakening happens when you stop bullshitting yourself into continual non-awakening. It’s very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality. Spiritual practice may be an important means of confronting yourself, or it may be a means of avoiding yourself; it all depends on your attitude and intention.”

— Adyashanti, “Who Hears This Sound?”

Pain teaches a most counter-intuitive thing — that we must go down before we even know what up is. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as ‘whenever you are not in control.’

All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.

If we cannot find a way to make our wounds into sacred wounds, we invariably become negative or bitter. If there isn’t some way to find some deeper meaning to our suffering, to find that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, we will normally close up and close down.

— Richard Rohr, Adapted from “Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality”

“Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.

The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.

— Albert Einstein

Part of the reason we want to be God is that secretly we believe we have all the answers. Yet God is patient in calling us slowly to ever-greater wisdom. Usually God does this by making our self-constructed world fall apart. Our personal ‘salvation project’ must always show itself to be almost totally wrong; in fact, the refusal to allow this falling apart is what creates legalism and moralism in religions.

The pain of things falling apart is called suffering, and it is one of God’s ways to show us that life is always bigger than we imagine it to be. Faith is what sustains us through this suffering, and it allows us to discover that we can survive only be relying on a Much Greater Source.

God is always drawing us closer, blow by blow and bit by bit. And most of the time we do not even know it is happening.

— Richard Rohr, “On the Threshold of Transformation: Daily Meditations for Men”

“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them — if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”

— J. D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”