‘Death of a Salesman’ is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.
Who is God? Who are we? What is our purpose? All these questions remain unanswered. I want to reach the genuine seeker of spiritual well-being. My goal is to satisfy the hunger and longing for those who are seeking the truth.
The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?
This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.
It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
Why would anyone walk through life satisfied with the light from the candle of their own understanding when, by reaching out to our Heavenly Father, they could experience the bright sun of spiritual knowledge that would expand their minds with wisdom and fill their souls with joy?
There the union of Church and State tends strongly to paralyze some of the members of the body of Christ. Here there is no such influence to destroy spiritual life and power.
Poverty is relative, and the lack of food and of the necessities of life is not necessarily a hardship. Spiritual and social ostracism, the invasion of your privacy, are what constitute the pain of poverty.
The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
I’m not a real religious guy. I’m a spiritual guy and my religion is love.
I really think that’s the key, part of the spiritual renewal that America needs to have, the notion that we really can have confidence in a better tomorrow.
Theosophy tries to bridge the gulf between Buddhism and Christianity by pointing to the fundamental spiritual truths on which both religions are built, and by winning people to regard the Buddha and the Christ as fellow-laborers, and not as rivals.
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
I just want people to be affected by the music. I’m really affected by my surroundings and put everything in my music – what I’m not getting and what I desire. I want it to be uncompromised… almost a spiritual thing.
Men have to descend from their pedestal and learn how to be more broadminded and spiritual.
I’m a fan of homeopathy, acupuncture and spiritual healing. In Australia, this is not weird, but when I arrived in the U.K., everyone thought I was a freak.
You can have financial strength, professional strength, emotional strength but for me without spiritual strength none of the rest of it matters.
Bread for myself is a material question. Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one.
The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life – mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.
We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race.
The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, ‘Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.’
It’s too bad prayer comes bundled in a package of ‘spiritual disciplines.’ Really, we should see prayer as a spiritual privilege. We don’t do it as a callisthenic exercise to gain points with God; we do it, because it is good for us in every way.
I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn’t really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don’t want to solve problems in poems that haven’t been solved in the world.
A certain number of people seek power over other people in a desperate attempt to find themselves. They fail, for self-discovery is spiritual in nature, not social or political. Authoritatively telling other people what to do is their distraction from an inner emptiness they can never fill.
Perhaps nothing helps us make the movement from our little selves to a larger world than remembering God in gratitude. Such a perspective puts God in view in all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not just in the moments when life seems easy.
In order to experience everyday spirituality, we need to remember that we are spiritual beings spending some time in a human body.
Love in its essence is spiritual fire.
For me, the essence of the great American Dream is spiritual. I believe that our Constitution is inspired and that it is based on principles that are timeless and universal. This is the reason why 95% of all written constitutions throughout the world are modeled after our Constitution.
While in some countries there’s a feeling that literature must stay away from religion, this is not so in India – in the Indian way, literature is just another means to find a more spiritual life, to find our way to God.
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.
Humility is not cowardice. Meekness is not weakness. Humility and meekness are indeed spiritual powers.
I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body; but what I am, is religious.
Maybe it’s time to go back 2,000 years for a spiritual renaissance. If not, our days may be numbered and a terrible implosion is coming. There is no more middle ground. It is one or the other.
India and Vietnam are old civilizations. We have ancient cultural and spiritual connections.
More than this, even in those white men who professed religion we found much inconsistency of conduct. They spoke much of spiritual things, while seeking only the material.
The spiritual quest was always the predominant aspect of my life. It’s always been there. But there’s also an incredible passion connected to it; it’s not just a dry investigative process. I have been extremely emotional about it, and that comes out in the songs.
The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another’s, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.
Kelly Preston is a remarkable human being and a great dramatic actress. It was a privilege as a director to tap into this part of her. Rarely do I make a kind of spiritual connection with my cast. Kelly was a wonderful exception. She is truly very special and I adore her.
We all have to go through our own spiritual process. It is very difficult. Some people are struggling and they are in their teens. Some people are in their 50s and they’re struggling. Some people go through life and die not being able to accept themselves. Tragic. But it’s very individual. And it’s about self-esteem.
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work.
I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn’t what I was after at all.
Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.
To me, growing into spiritual maturity is becoming less self-conscious and more God-conscious.
Those nations that say it’s a crime to preach your religion are making a terrible mistake. All they’re doing is driving underground other forms of spiritual intuitions and practices.
I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code – even though it was a great yawn – also showed people’s interest in religion.
You can have a spiritual awakening and discover a new side of you at any age. And best of all, love can happen at any age. Life can just start to get exciting when you’re in your 40s and 50s. You have to believe that.
I wanted to share the experience of how yoga and meditation have transformed my life, how they have enabled me to observe who I am, first in my body, and then emotionally, and on to a kind of spiritual path.
