Category: Spirituality

“Will you engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear; with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one? This is your choice and no one can make it for you.  If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy, then you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, this worldly salvation. If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak. These are not ontological realities tucked away somewhere in space – these are existential realities playing out in your own mind.  Heaven and hell are both inside you. It is your choice that determines where you will reside.”
– Rabbi Rami Shapiro

“Shock and awe is a military tactic. Comfort and awe is a spiritual alternative. The military option supports the will to dominate. The spiritual option supports the commitment to liberate. We share with all people an awesome grace: the path to peace, on the walk of truth and reconciliation, with justice lived for the sake of all creation. We do not seek control, but something much more transformational and enduring. We seek kinship.”

— Steven Charleston

(Photo by Kinø on Unsplash)

“You cannot possibly say that you are what you think yourself to be! Your
ideas about yourself change from day to day and from moment to moment. Your
self-image is the most changeful thing you have. It is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy
of a passer by. A bereavement, the loss of a job, an insult – and your image of
yourself, which you call your person, changes deeply. To know what you are, you
must first investigate and know what you are NOT. And to know what you are not, you
must watch yourself carefully, rejecting all that does not necessarily go with the
basic fact: ‘I am’. The ideas: I am born at a given place, at a given time, from my
parents and now I am so-and-so, living at, married to, father of, employed by, and so
on, are not inherent in the sense ‘I am’. Our usual attitude is: ‘I am this’. Separate
consistently and perseveringly the ‘I am’ from ‘this’ or ‘that’, and try to feel what it
means to BE, just to BE, without being ‘this’ or ‘that’. All our habits go against it and
the task of fighting them is long and hard sometimes, but clear understanding helps a
lot. The clearer you understand that, on the level of the mind, you can be described in
negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of your search and realize
your limitless being.”

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That