Watts: “There are two ways of understanding an experience. The first is to compare it with the memories of other experiences, and so to name and define it. This is to interpret it in accordance with the dead and the past. The second is to be aware of it as it is, as when, inContinue reading “Out of the Box”
Tag Archives: Reality
Always Here
Heschel: “It takes three things to attain a sense of significant being: God, a soul, and a moment. And the three are always here. Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.” A sign is something that, by definition, points beyond itself. A curved arrow on a sign alongside the road indicatesContinue reading “Always Here”
Breakpoint for Religion
Heschel: “You can affect a person only if you reach his [or her] inner life, the level where every human being is insecure and feels his [or her] incompleteness, the level of awareness that lies beyond articulation. “The soul is discovered in response, in acts of transcending the self, in the awareness of ends thatContinue reading “Breakpoint for Religion”
Faith For Today
Heschel: “Faith in the sense of being involved in the mystery of God and [humanity] is not the same as acceptance of definitive formulations of articles of belief. Even [one] who merely strives for faith in the living God is on the threshold of faith. The test is honesty and stillness. “Our error is inContinue reading “Faith For Today”
Two Small, Really Big Words
Watts: “If we want to keep the old language, still using such terms as ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’, the spiritual must mean ‘the indefinable’, that which, because it is living, must ever escape the framework of any fixed form. Matter is spirit named.” Question: Why would we want to keep the “old language”? If it’s increasinglyContinue reading “Two Small, Really Big Words”
Our Predicament
Watts: “We seem to be like flies caught in honey. Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated. We love it and hate it at the same time. We fall in love with peopleContinue reading “Our Predicament”
Are We Spiritual Idiots?
Heschel: “Is it not possible that we are entering a stage in history out of which we may emerge as morons, as an affluent society of spiritual idiots?” What is spiritual intelligence? Do “spirit,” “spiritual” and “spirituality” even have a place in a worldview that rejects metaphysical realism as a foundational assumption? If the mythologicalContinue reading “Are We Spiritual Idiots?”
No Wonder
Heschel: “The grandeur and mystery of the world that surrounds us is not something which is perceptible only to the elect. All [of us] are endowed with a sense of wonder, with a sense of mystery. But our system of education fails to develop it and the anti-intellectual climate of our civilization does much toContinue reading “No Wonder”
Tracts of Revolution 