"If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God."
"Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority."
"Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101."
"every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us."
"Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing."
"I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona."
"The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future."
"If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms."
"People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place."
"It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE – IS – HARD."
"When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us."
"Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy."
"God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object."
"Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial."
"When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves"
"In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you."
"Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events."
"I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you."
"The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime."
"The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything."
"I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once."
"Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself."
"Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God."
"You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while."
"Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power."