The fundamentalists of every faith remain blind to the truth that the sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, and the Jew. I have seen this unity with my eyes, heard it with my ears, felt it with all my being.
David James Duncan
I started having doubts right on top of my certainty.
doubt faith
I'd trapped myself in a script.. But to be scripted at all is to be prepackaged, programmed, pinned to a page. Only the unwritten can truly live a life. So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.
independence individuality conformity freedom
mysticism religion spirituality
To every Armageddonist, every earth lover must keep saying with all the sincerity and affection we can muster, May God make this world as beautiful to you as it has been to me.
nature religion spirituality beauty-in-nature
Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while useful becomes lifeless and deadly without it. In accord with this distinction a yearning to worship on wilderness ridges or beside rivers rather than in churches could legitimately be called evangelical if your words or deeds harmonize with the example of Jesus, you are evangelical in spirit whether you claim to be or not. When the non-Christian Ambrose Bierce wrote, War is the means by which Americans learn geography, his words are aimed at the same antiwar end as Blessed are the peacemakers.
nature religion spirituality evangelism
I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.
sacrifice charity
And so I learned what solitude really was. It was raw material - awesome, malleable, older than men or worlds or water. And it was merciless - for it let a man become precisely what he alone made of himself.
solitude
There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.
spirituality
At last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing-- a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.
realization emptiness
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