We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.
– Emerson
the words that often open our hearts to others and soften out hearts to receive their words to us
- Rabbi Mark Schiftan
How tall the buildings were as I began
To live, and how high the rain that battered them!
Why, coming down them, as I often did at night,
Was a dream even before you reached the first gullies
– John Ashbery
Now a large herd of swine* was feeding there on the hillside.
– Mark 5:11
It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant
– William James
in the yoga of action, you first
renounce your own selfish will.
– Bhagavad Gita
Yeshua took him by the hand, raised him, and he stood up.
– Mark 9:27
Those gracious influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are altogether supernatural—are quite different from anything that unregenerate men experience. They are what no improvement, or composition of natural qualifications or principles will ever produce; because they not only differ from what is natural, and from everything that natural men experience in degree and circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a nature far more excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious affections there are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely different in their nature and kind from anything experienced by the [same] saints before they were sanctified….
– Jonathon Edwards
If you receive the world,
the Tao will never leave you
and you will be like a little child.
– Tao Te Ching
אֵ֣לֶּה תוֹלְד֧וֹת הַשָּׁמַ֛יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם בְּי֗וֹם עֲשׂ֛וֹת יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶ֥רֶץ וְשָׁמָֽיִם׃
Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created. When God יהוה made earth and heaven—
– Bereshit
I must ask you to listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the shifting of men’s centres of personal energy within them and the lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speak of the subconscious region, in which such processes of flowering may occur, in a somewhat less vague way.
– William James
Know the personal,
yet keep to the impersonal:
accept the world as it is.
– Tao Te Ching
God יהוה formed the Human from the soil’s humus, blowing into his nostrils the breath of life: the Human became a living being.
– Bereshit
it was ambrosia
In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable
Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things
– John Ashbery
the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ’s blood, the sacraments, and the individual’s ordinary religious duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender followed by relief should be experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received, and Christ’s sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if not the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The individual models which it has set up as typical and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically they have been the more complete.
– William James
He who finds peace and joy
and radiance within himself —
that man becomes one with God
and vanishes into God’s bliss.
– Bhagavad Gita
This association appeared very fortunate, and fortunately adapted to what I wanted at least to suggest.
– Derrida
Thus the Master is available to all people
and doesn’t reject anyone.
– Tao Te Ching
mark forshee 