A Quote by Robin Skynner
Anyone who feels that they're in some way plugged into a meaningful, cosmic system is given a greater psychological balance as a result-whether or not they believe it contains a god-like figure at the control panels. Lots of people have this beneficial sense of being plugged into something bigger, even if they're not religious in the going-to-church-regularly sense.
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There is a fundamental spiritual quality to gratitude that transcends religious traditions. Gratitude is a universal human experience that can seem to be either a random occurrence of grace or a chosen attitude to create a better experience of life; in many ways it contains elements of both. Grateful people sense that they are not separated from others or from God; this recognition of unity with all things brings a deep sense of gratefulness, whether we are religious or not.
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.
Conversation on the page should reflect what the story is about. It doesn't have to be "realistic" in the sense that it's something you heard and plugged into a story.
What we call stress is just extension of being busy without meaning. When you do things that are not meaningful to you, just to get the sense of completion, just to feel like you got something done, your spirit feels empty. So, the most important thing for people to realize is that you have to control the flow of information in your life.
We are not just bundles of atoms being pushed around. But, there's something spiritual about us whether we give that a religious interpretation or not. And so, it's that sense of there being dignity to life that I associate with the word God. I mean, that's probably a pretty radical and agnostic way of interpreting it. But, that's what I think.
I never wake up wondering whether the day is going to be a meaningful one or whether my labors are gonna be worthwhile. They may be futile, but it doesn't mean they're not important, in a moral sense and in an historical sense.
Even if you don't believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
When I'm really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It's like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It's mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.
I regularly see constituents, speak to people who feel let down by the justice system quite fundamentally, and these are people who don't make the headlines. These are people who have felt that their sense - their grief, their sense of injustice has been compounded by a system that just doesn't work, that just doesn't listen to victims, that effectively disempowers them all too often.
The idea of flux, kind of constant change, whether it be our sense of time or geological time or cosmic time. It's always there, and I think that maybe it's a way of dealing with the idea of mortality, trying to acknowledge the fact that all things change, and whereas, maybe death is the end of one state of being it's the beginning of something else. I'm not talking about going to heaven or being reincarnated as a toad, I'm talking about the idea that the molecules in our bodies, or at least the atoms, were here at the beginning of the universe, and the sense that we are basically matter.
I think for some people who leave Westboro, losing that sense of specialness feels like you've lost something really valuable and important. I had the opposite experience. I was so grateful to know that I wasn't uniquely evil. I was just a human being who had had this set of experiences that were outside of my control.
I love being lost! I don't need to control anything. Even with romantic partnerships, I don't need to control anyone. I think I have some very meaningful relationships with people, we all do. At the same time, I recognize that everyone is following their own heart; there's been people who have left my life and I don't have a problem with that.
When I was in my teens I had a series of intensely religious experiences. They deepened my sense of God as the creator of all things. And they also deepened my sensitivity towards creation itself so that concern for God's creatures and animal rights followed from that. Some people think I'm an animal rights person who just happens, almost incidentally, to be religious. In fact, it's because I believe in God that I'm concerned about God's creatures. The religious impulse is primary.
If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.
Every believer is commanded to be plugged in to a local church.
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