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| Instead of assuming that matter is the ultimate reality, we may assume that the ultimate reality is Spirit - Spirit hiding itself from itself so as to be able to experience growth in knowledge and power, the excitement of conquest and discovery, the surprise of the unknown, the challenge of opposition, the triumph of victory - all those wonderful experiences that you, the infinite and immortal Spirit, can't have unless you forget, at least for a while, your omniscience and your omnipotence... [more] | God isn't interested in our moral maturity. He's interested in our becoming aware not merely of Him but of being Him. He is no bookkeeper. The universe is too vast to be framed in terms of duties and rewards. Right and wrong, good and bad, if they are not purely relative, are so according to their capacity to bring us closer to, or take us farther away from, our conscious identity with Him, individually as well as collectively... [more] |
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| Many idealists say that the object is really the subject, and many materialists say that the subject is really the object. They agree in thinking these two statements very different, while yet holding that subject and object are not different... [more] | Science itself is more limited by the un-prestatable, unpredictable creativity in the universe than we have realized, and, in any case, science is not the only path to knowledge and understanding... [more] |
| As I've talked to them, everyone of my dying patients reports to me they feel a great sense of peace as death comes. They describe being in the midst of a beautiful, loving, divine presence. Close to the end, my dying patients appear to be overcome by a moment of final grace and rapture. There's a glorious light, they always say. There's a last, great overwhelming thrust of love propelling them across the chasm. I think that tells us what lies on the other side of this life, when we finally "pass over." I know it comforts me every single day of my life. This has become one of the more important lessons I've learned as a physician. For me there is no surer evidence that something glorious and wonderful lies beyond our mortal existence. Death is not an end. It is a new beginning... [more] | Within Western culture the separation between inner and outer life and the privileging of the outer world over the inner world seems to be an accepted and largely unconscious decision. Emphasis on grades, test scores, and intellectual achievement in educational environments with no acknowledgement of the emotional or physical life of students is a prime example. This separation has become so embedded in consciousness that few seem to notice that their lives have become an unending series of tasks. The idea of taking time for reflection, stopping and actually attending to experience as it is unfolding instant by instant and attending to life as it is now, is not even deemed worthy of the time it would take to declare the project unworthy... [more] |
| If findings prove to be replicable, the scientific community concludes that they represent a discovery about reality rather than a construction by the observer. However, this term "finding" conceals a metaphysical assumption that things can be found which exist independently of observers... [more] | Scientists have been slow to recognize the possibility that mystics and trained observers in other cultures such as the Tibetan, which focus more on inner realms of experience, might be capable of observations which are as foreign to Western scientists as the latter's trained observations are to the man in the street... [more] |
| I look forward to meeting in the Next World - to their great astonishment - Dennett, Pinker, Dawkins and the rest of the materialist caucus. If they are not to be found there, I shall know either that they are, as Jaron Lanier suggests, zombies, or that their beliefs have somehow prevented them crossing the gang-plank for this most exciting of voyages... [more] | The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist... [more] |
