Confrontation and Truth

It is difficult to describe the sense of freedom and peace that comes from breaking through fears to tell the truth. But once you have experienced this dimension of truth telling in your relationships, you will never want to settle for less.
    ~ Layne and Paul Cutright, Straight from the Heart

No matter how elaborately it is disguised, the truth always reveals itself in the end. Why not tell the truth now, and face our fears head on, instead of burying the truth and living in perpetual fear of every little tremor we feel underfoot. It takes courage to be authentic. It take courage to spill the beans when we know the other person hates beans. But if beans are all you have, why pretend they are grapes?
    ~ Paul Ferrini,  Enlightenment for Everyone

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
    ~ M. Scott Peck

Origin of Peace

"Peace of mind is clearly an internal matter.
It must begin with your own thoughts,
and then extend outward.
It is from your peace of mind
that a peaceful perception of the world arises."
        ~ A Course in Miracles

Imagination

Beloved God who fills my heart with a song of love, I thank you for each glimpse of divinity, each spark of a divine idea, each opportunity to choose again, to see anew, to remember to see with Your eyes.

Joyful Work

The topic this week was gratitude and work, and I found this quote especially meaningful for me, since I start a new job tomorrow.

~ Paul Ferrini, The Silence of the Heart
"There are hundreds, if not thousands of ways, in which you can cheat yourself and work out of sacrifice or duty. There are just as many ways in which you can cheat others and work out of impatience and greed. Be aware of the many subtle ways in which you can betray yourself and/or others. Do not settle for the rewards the world would give you. Material wealth, name and fame will not bring you happiness. Only work that is joyful will bring you happiness. Only work that is joyful will bring happiness to others. Do not think that happiness can come from sacrifice or struggle. The means must be consistent with the ends. The goal unfolds through the process itself."

Anybody Out There Reading This Blog?

One of my volunteer jobs is to research quotes on different spiritual topics to be used for readings at the Unity Center I attend. A number of people at my church know about this job, and often ask if I can give them the quotes they heard in the service. I originally started this blog to provide a place for easily sharing those quotes. However, now the Unity Center actually has a spot on their web site where they post the readings each week, so this is redundant.

I'm contemplating several possibilities for this blog:
!) Just delete it.
2) Just continue as things are now - occasionally posting my favorite quotes, or perhaps a few of the ones I like that don't end up getting used on Sundays.
2) Re-purpose it - instead of using it to post the quotes, share the short little prayers I use at the top of the emails I send out with prayer requests (another of my volunteer jobs is to send emails to our prayer partners with the prayer requests the church has received.)

Anybody out there? Anybody care which option I choose?

Jesus Without Dogma

This week's topic - following that Third Jesus, without getting bogged down in the dogma of the second one that many churches focus on exclusively.

~ Eckhart Tolle
"Dogmas - religious, political, scientific - arise out of the erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or the truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of "I know." Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity that its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others. What is the basic delusion? Identification with thought."

So perhaps the dogma itself is the veil that hides Reality from us?

And this one ...

~ Felix Adler
"Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience."

So someone in history had the inner experience, tried to put it in words and capture it in thought, to create a template for others to match their experience. But maybe we don't need the words, or someone else's thoughts, but just a direct experience of our own.

A New Way of Being

Wendy's topic this week was a New Way of Being, again based on Deepak Chopra's The Third Jesus. In looking for quotes, I came across an author who is new to me - Daphne Rose Kingma. She has such a lovely way of expressing this new way of being - I definitely plan to check out some of her books.

~ Daphne Rose Kingma, The Future of Love
"Something wonderful is happening in all of this chaos but nobody knows what it is. ...
There is a grand transformation afoot. A mysterious energy seems to be taking quietly over, and things just aren't the way they used to be. A new world, a new way of being, is being born in our midst. We can feel it.
There's a new softness in our midst, a way of being with one another, that is gracious and gentle and kind. There is also a beautiful strangely infiltrating awareness, a mystic pulse of connection that seems to be gathering us together. Love is trying to find us."

Isn't that lovely? Like the wind change in Mary Poppins, it's a delicious feeling, anticipating grace.

~ Daphne Rose Kingma, The Future of Love
"I believe that we were all together once as a single, vast, pulsating, luminous consciousness that was divided bit by bit, person by person, into the tiny shining fragments that are our individual souls. Love is the river, each human being a droplet of water, and together, in spite of our fears and resistance, we are returning to love, melting and flowing toward home.
No one can escape the divine upheaval of love. I haven't; you won't; your neighbors and strangers and family won't either. Love is coming to find us. All of us. Because love is our essence. Love is who we are.”