Life is both pleasure and pain, is it not? But why should we cling to pleasure and avoid pain? Why not merely live with both? If you cling to pleasure what happens? You get attached, do you not?
Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.
I love you because all the loves in the world are like different rivers flowing into the same lake where they meet and are transformed into a single love that becomes rain and blesses the earth.
It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
The spiritual path is one of falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, turning and looking sheepishly at God and then taking the next step.
A wound in the soul, coming from the rending of the spiritual body, strange as it may seem, gradually closes like a physical wound. And once a deep wound heals over and the edges seem to have knit, a wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from inside. This was the way Natasha's wound healed. She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of life - love - was still alive in her. Love awoke, and life awoke.
Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions,
but actually, the opposite is true.
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to
answer your questions, but to question your answers.