A Quote by Eugene Green
Spiritual truth is something that is so far from us - without any form or name that we can imagine - that we need the things that religions gave us simply as images and metaphors. But they can be found in a variety of ways. It's not a question of religious practice.
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At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.
I spent a month in India and where I learnt an important word for me, for everything that had come before and after, and the was the word 'seva' - the work you do without wanting reward, simply for the work itself, for the spiritual, for the practice and the experience it gives you by doing that work. I began to realise it was something I was searching for all my life, that I was doing theatre not for myself but for something for a search, for a seeking for something that is behind that, to find a truth somewhere about us.
Any revelation from God's Word that does not lead us to an encounter with God only serves to make us more religious. The Church cannot afford 'form without power,' for it creates Christians without purpose.
There are so many things in life that divide us, that separate us and tear us apart, be it race, religion, creed, socioeconomic level, nationality or any variety of other factors. But running is something that we all share in common.
Images embrace us: they open up to us and close themselves to us in so far as they conjure up in us something that we could call an interior experience.
When a soul has advanced so far on the spiritual road as to be lost to all the natural methods of communing with God; when it seeks Him no longer by meditation, images, impressions, nor by any other created ways, or representations of sense, but only by rising above them all, in the joyful communion with Him by faith and love, then it may be said to have found God of a truth, because it has truly lost itself as to all that is not God, and also as to its own self.
We don't need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that's within us, and use it. When we do that, and stop imitating others and competing against them, things begin to work for us.
I think we're all brothers - that's the truth. But the press gave us the name black Muslims to cut us off from the others.
Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us.
I feel that I'm a spiritual person in that I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it's something that we need as a culture and as humans. We need for people to put stories up in front of us that we recognize ourselves so that we can see - you need to be able to see something in a finite form in order to identify with it sometimes because your life sprawls before you in this kind of way that you can't capture.
Religious life is not going to go away. It will take a different form. Why am I so sure it's not going to go away? Because there are people whose personalities and gifts, and interests and soul, are simply immersed in living this kind of a spiritual lifestyle. That only makes sense. If you can live an artistic lifestyle, why can't somebody live a spiritual lifestyle? We've always, in every single great tradition, had a percentage of the population that stands in the middle of us being the beacon that calls us to realize that the spiritual life is an essential part of every life.
Let us work without desire for name or fame or rule over others. Let us be free from the triple bonds of lust, greed of gain, and anger. And this truth is with us!
When we talk about the Universe Story we are talking about the acquisition of a totally new paradigm, one which overturns many of the patterns that we unconsciously believe to be true. There is not simply the addition of new metaphors and images, but the metaphors and images themselves flow out of a new consciousness inspired by a new awareness of the cosmos.
The highest religious and spiritual ideals of any faith would invite us to a compassion for all lives destroyed by the violence that plagues us.
What is that which can never die It is that faithful force that is born into us that one that is greater than us that calls new seed to the open and battered and barren places so that we can be resown. It is this force in its insistence in its loyalty to us in its love of us in its most often mysterious ways that is far greater far more majestic and far more ancient than any heretofore ever known.
The religious stories, the religious truths, the spiritual principles - obviously, they don't change. But as you get older and you experience more, you recognize the applicability, the profundity, and the fundamental truths of spiritual principles in ways that you couldn't when you simply were living a less dimensional life.
