“Learning always involves self-transcendence. Learning calls forth what is in us, helping us to move toward authenticity and wholeness.”

The struggle against atheism is foremost and of necessity a struggle against the inadequacy of our own theism.

Grace can and does have a history.

Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every ‘should’ is a compulsion, and not every ‘like’ is a high morality and true freedom.

What Christ gives us is quite explicit if his own words are interpreted according to their Aramaic meaning. The expression ‘This is my Body’ means this is myself.

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise.

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

Love alone allows man to forget himself… it alone can still redeem even the darkest hours of the past since it alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.

The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.

In the post-Christian world, all Christians will be mystics.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

But there is yet another form of this hidden heresy, and, paradoxically, it can affect those who are proudest of their long-standing and unimpeachable orthodoxy; heresy in the form of indifference.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

I mean, whatever kills you kills you, and your death is authentic no matter how you die.