When you see through contemplative eyes, you refuse to identify with any one side. You hold the tension between what seems to be conflict and go beyond words, which are limiting, to experience, which has the potential to unify what seems to be contradictions.

Detached observation of ourselves helps us to recognize our own darkness and to deal with it, but only when ready.

The task of religion is to keep you fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then you will know whatever it is that you need to know. When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple and at the same time, that hard. Too much religion has encouraged you to be unconscious, but God loves you more than that.

As long as you think you are fully in control, you are going to keep using your old learned responses. You need to rewire the old system and the only way to do that is by trusting that darkness will lead to depth, freedom, and love. Change happens when you are standing, at the same time, within both safety and conflict, tradition and newness.

Authentic spirituality is always seeking to feed our soul. Watch the lens through which we are seeing the moment or we will not see things as they are, but rather see things as we are! 

We make the mistake of feeling emotions are caused by something out there. We like to play the victim. “He made me do it,” or “My abusive parent made me the way I am.”  It takes real spiritual and emotional maturity to recognize that our response always and finally comes from us. 

Prayer is not changing God’s mind about us, but allowing God to change our mind about God and the reality right in front of us. 

The mistake we make is that we do not realize that it is how we see that determines what we see and how it will affect us and what our response will be. What and how we see the outer world is a mirror of our state of consciousness. Most of the time, we just do not see at all, but operate on cruise control.

Philosophers tend toward the universals and poets love the particulars, it is the mystics who teach us how to encompass both.

Those who don’t know what to do with this life are the ones who are bothered about what they are going to do with another life. One sign that you’re awake is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life. You’re not bothered about it; you don’t care. You are not interested. Forget the past. When you hear “Repent for your past,” realize it’s a great religious distraction from waking up. Wake up! That’s what repent means. Not “weep for your sins.” Wake up! Understand, stop all the crying.