“Helping out is not some special skill. It is not the domain of rare individuals. It is not confined to a single part or time of our lives. We simply heed the call of that natural caring impulse and follow where it leads.” Ram Dass and Paul Gorman
“The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.” Nikolai Berdyaev
“Service is the rent one pays for living.” Marian Wright Edelman
“Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.” Mahatma Gandhi
“Reconnecting politics to our best values is now the most important task of a political life.” Jim Wallis
“In my dreams last night my friend, tearful, disappointed, said that I had promised that if we faced our “shadow” good thing would follow. I replied, “No, I said that if we face our shadow, we will be closer to wholeness, and so we can better cope with whatever happens.” Sometimes I need to listen to my dreams.” Glenda Taylor
“There is a marvelous story of a man who once stood before God, his heart breaking from the pain and injustice in the world. ‘Dear God,’ he cried out, ‘look at all the suffering, the anguish and distress in your world. Why don’t you send help?’ God responded, ‘I did send help. I sent you.’” David J. Wolpe
“Goodwill is the mightiest practical force in the universe.” Talmudic saying
“A young man eagerly described what he dreamed of doing for the poor.
Said the Master, ‘When do you propose to make your dream come true?’
‘As soon as the opportunity arrives.’
‘Opportunity never arrives,’ said the Master. ‘It’s here!’” Anthony de Mello
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” Mother Teresa
“Just because something is impossible doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it!” Anonymous, Quoted by Parker J. Palmer
“A teacher tears to shreds a map of the world and, thinking it an impossible task, gives it to a recalcitrant student to put together. Within ten minutes the boy is back, the task completed. Astounded, the teacher asks him how he did it. The boy replied, “When I turned the pieces over, I found a torn-up man. I put him together, and when I looked at the other side the world was whole again.” Soozi Holbeche
“The most excellent jihad is the uttering of truth in the presence of an unjust ruler.” Islam. Hadith of Tirmidhi
“My children, war, fear, and disunity have brought you from your villages to this sacred council fire. Facing a common danger, and fearing for the lives of your families, you have yet drifted apart, each tribe thinking and acting only for itself…Remember that you are brothers, that the downfall of one means the downfall of all…” Hiawatha, Onondaga Tradition
“O contending peoples and kindreds of the earth! Set your faces toward unity, and let the radiance of its light shine upon you. Gather ye together, and for the sake of God resolve to root out whatever is the source of contention among you. Then will the effulgence of the world’s great Luminary envelop the whole earth, and its inhabitants become the citizens of one city, and the occupants of one and the same throne.” Baha’I Faith. Gleanings from the Writing of Baha’u’llah 111
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” John Wesley
“Be patient, surely God’s promise is true. And ask forgiveness for your sin, and proclaim the praise of your Lord at evening and dawn.” Islam. Qur’an 40.55
“Prosperity forsakes those who always dream of fate and favors those who persevere. One should therefore always be active and alert.” Hinduism. Matsya Purana 22l.2
“A man once asked the prophet what was the best thing in Islam, and the latter replied, ‘It is to feed the hungry and to give the greeting of peace both to those one knows and to those one does not know.’ Islam. Hadith of Bukhari
“As a mother with her own life guards the life of her own child, let all-embracing thoughts for all that lives be thine.” Buddhism. Khuddaka Patha, Metta Sutta
“And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.” Christianity. Galatians 6.9
“What sort of religion can it be without compassion? You need to show compassion to all living beings. Compassion is the root of all religious faiths.” Hinduism. Basavanna, Vacana 247
“All men are responsible for one another.” Judaism. Talmud, Sanhedrin 27b
“Let all mankind be thy sect.” Sikhism. Adi Granth, Japuji 28, M.1, p. 6
“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” The Dalai Lama
Love is letting go of fear. Jerald G. Jampolsky, M.D.
God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction. Meister Eckhart
“To be free, to be able to stand up and leave everything behind–without looking back. To say Yes–…To be, in faith, both humble and proud: that is, to live, to know that in God I am nothing, but that God is in me…To say Yes to life is at one and the same time to say Yes to oneself. Yes–even to that element in one which is most unwilling to let itself be transformed from a temptation into a strength…” Dag Hammarskjolk
“Your whole life consists in burning bridges behind you.” Thomas Merton
…When Inanna entered the first gate, the crown of the steppe was removed from her head. Inanna asked: “What is this?” She was told: “Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned. When Inanna entered the second gate, her lapis beads were removed from her neck. When she entered the third gate, her double strand of beads was removed from her breast. When she entered the fourth gate, her breastplate…was removed from her chest. When she entered the fifth gate, her gold ring was removed from her wrist. When she entered the sixth gate her lapis measuring rod and line were removed from her hand. When she entered the seventh gate, her royal white robe was removed from her body. At each gate, Inanna asked: “What is this?” At each gate she was told: “Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.” From Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer, Translated by Diane Wolkstein and S. N. Kramer
“Today few of us attend mystery schools, but Ceridwen, keeper of the cauldron of changes, is at work in our own lives when the soul demand to be attended to. She hunts us down, forcing us to be fluid, to adapt, to shape-shift into new roles that challenge our ideas of who we are.” Mara Freeman
“The source of change, of transformation, in the individual comes from within the individual himself, rather than from any outside agent.” June Singer
“…all shapes are worn thin by the working of time; they age, sicken, crumble to dust–unless they change. But change they can, for the invisible spark that generated them is potent enough for infinite generation…” Carl Jung 100:553
“All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…This “outgrowing” proved on further investigation to be a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of his outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. It was not repressed and mad e unconscious, but merely appeared in a different light, ans really did become different. What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, form the higher level of personality now looked like a storm in the valley seen from the mountain top. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it.” Carl Jung 112:17, 18
“If the old were not ripe for death, nothing new would appear; and if the old were not blocking the way for the new, it could not and need not be rooted out.” Carl Jung 69:446
“Great losses often occur at midlife: children move away, a fried dies, divorce devastates…The adult feels not only angst but a loss of identity…What this tells us is how much of our lives have been caught up in the projections of meaning and identity onto the Other, be it spouse, child or persona…What is essential is to honor the relationship by feeling its loss and yet recognize that one has had, all along, a commitment larger than any single relationship. A person who has suffered loss and the withdrawal of projections will have struggled with the dependencies which haunt us all, but also will have asked the next question, “How much of the unknown me was tied up in that person or that role?” When we can acknowledge loss and recoup the energy that was once invested outside ourselves, it becomes available for the next stage of the journey.” James Hollis
“What I most want is to spring out of this personality, then to sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.” Rumi
“Looking back on the history of “knowledge,” it becomes clear that it changes every century and is different in each civilization. Still, most people believe that what they know about the world is true. For example, people once knew that the world was flat, that the sun went around the earth, and that space was fixed and absolute and filled with something called “ether.”…In spite of being “wrong,” many ideas seem to have worked just fine for the people who knew them to be true…In this late age of civilization, as our previous myths and religions grow old, science has arisen to take their place, offering new names for the same old cloud of unanswered questions. The new scientific paradigm presents a shimmering, unknowable reality full of mysterious quarks and pions and gluons and antiprotons and strong and weak forces, leaving us, in the end, with uncertainty, expect for the probability that we still don’t know anything…the moral is that it is time to slow down and relax, to learn less of doing and more of being. Given the brevity of our existence and the fact that we don’t know what it means or what we are supposed to be doing her, perhaps our only recourse is to learn how to be in the moment with what is before us…” Wes Nisker
_____________________
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird
When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf
Wendell Berry
“The truth is–for every one of us–that there is no way to avoid the trauma of loss if we love even a little. This is what makes the task of learning to handle grief so important…No one sows and reaps in the same day, so learning how to lose creatively is not something we can afford to postpone.” John Claypool
“When Job got all the way down to God–to the One with whom we ultimately have to deal–he was there given the grace to see both the past and the future differently..The One from whom had come “the good old days” could be trusted to provide “good new days.” If yesterday was so full of meaning, who not tomorrow? All the days come from the same Source! This is how Job moved through his grief–in fact, emerged twice the person he had been.” John Claypool
“Turn around right where you are and face the frightening situation, the lion on your path. Don’t waver and dodge. Look the problem in the eye and call it nothing. Speak to it in definitive words so that there is no doubt that it must go. Wisdom tells us to get out of harm’s way at times, but it never tells us to weep with fear. Once we turn to face it, a quiet determined strength pours in to end the terror. Fear is terrorism. It is not running from it that cripples us but refusing to call it what it is. When fear takes over it flows through all our thinking. If we have any faith at all, it is scared faith, but faith will grow when we charge it with determination and powerful words.” From the Native American, Dragging Canoe
“Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty , like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it.—It should not be suffered to tyrannize in the imagination to raise phantoms of horror, or to beset life with supernumerary distresses.” Johnson
“In time we hate that which we often fear.” Shakespeare
“There is a virtuous fear which is the effect of faith, and a vicious fear which is the product of doubt and distrust—the former leads to hope as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying upon God, in whom we do not believe.—Persons of the one character fear to lose God; those of the other character fear to find him.” Pascal
“In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.” Anna Jameson
“Any who believes in his Lord has no fear, either of loss or of any injustice.” Qur’an
“The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertaking are free from anxiety about results.” Bhagavad Gita
“The Exalted One said to Bhaddiya, “Bhaddiya, what motive have you, who are wont to resort to forest dwelling, to the roots of trees, to lonely spots, in exclaiming, ‘Ah!’ tis bliss! Ah! Tis bliss!?”
“Formerly, sir, when I enjoyed the bliss of royalty as a householder, within my palace guards were set and outside my palace guards were set. So also in the district and outside. Thus, sir, though guarded and protected, I dwelt fearful, anxious, trembling, and afraid. But now, sir, as I resort to forest-dwelling, to the roots of trees, to lonely spots, though alone, I am fearless, assured, confident, and unafraid. I live at ease, unstartled, lightsome, with heart like that of some wild creature. This, sir, was the motive Ihave for exclaiming, ‘Ah! Tis bliss! Ah! Tis bliss!”
From Udana, Buddhism
“Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous. Actually who are you not to be. You are a child of God.” Marianne Williamson
“Getting grabbed is scary, and it’s probably the hardest thing a person will ever have to do in her life. Without warning, you’re surrounded by figures with masks, so you don’t know who anybody is. When you’ve grown up knowing the faces of all the people in the village, it’s terrifying to all of a sudden not recognize anybody at all. And the dancers take you to the limits of what you can stand, they bring you face to face with every fear you ever had, and just before you go crazy they lead you back. With song and dance and ritual and magic, they lead you back from the very edge of total insanity so that nothing can ever really scare you again. You’ve seen the faces of your own worst fears, and lived through it, and come back, and from then you know your strength…” Anne Cameron.
“Never say of anything, ‘I lost it,’ but say, ‘I gave it back.’ Has your child died? It was given back…Has your estate been taken from you? Was not this also given back? But you say, ‘He who took it from me is wicked.’ What does it matter to you through whom the Giver asked it back? As long as He gives it you, take care of it, but not as your own; treat it as passersby treat an inn.” Epictetus.
“So long as you feel the human contact, the atmosphere of mutual confidence, there is no danger; and even if you have to face the terrors of insanity, or the shadowy menace of suicide, there is still that area of human faith, that certainty of understanding and of being understood, no matter how black the night.” (4:181) Jung
“When a patient begins to feel the inescapable nature of his inner development, he may easily be overcome by a panic fear that he is slipping helplessly into some kind of madness he can no longer understand. More than once I have had to reach for a book on my shelves, bring down an old alchemist, and show my patient his terrifying fantasy in the form in which it appeared four hundred years ago. This has a calming effect, because the patient then sees that he is not alone in the strange world which nobody understands but is part of the great stream of human history, which has experienced countless times the very things that he regards as a pathological proof of his craziness.” (50:325) Jung
“Nobody can fall so low unless he has a great depth. If such a thing can happen to a man, it challenges his best and highest on the other side; that is to say, this depth corresponds to a potential height, and the blackest darkness to a hidden light.” 43 Jung
“Each of us is equipped with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree and makes it practically illusory. Not only is “freedom of the will” an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a misnomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshiped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity.” 74:143. Jung
“Disappointment, always a shock to the feelings, is not only the mother of bitterness but the strongest possible incentive to a differentiation of feeling. The failure of a pet plan, the disappointing behavior of someone one loves, can supply the impulse either for a more or less brutal outburst of affect or for a modification and adjustment of feeling, and hence for its higher development. This culminates in wisdom if feeling is supplemented by reflection and rational insight. Wisdom is never violent; where wisdom reigns there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.” 48:334 Jung “Opposites can be united only in the form of compromise or irrationally, some new thing arising between them which, though different form both, yet has the power to take up their energies in equal measure as an expression of both and of neither. Such an expression cannot be contrived by reason, it can only be created through living.” 69:169 Jung
“The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm which is not easily disturbed, or else a brokeness that can hardly be healed. Conversely, it is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed in order to produce valuable and lasting results.” 54:50 Jung
“The small world of the child, the family milieu, is the model for the big world. The more intensely the family sets its stamp on the child, the more he will be emotionally inclined, as an adult, to see in the great world his former small world. Of course this must not be taken as a conscious intellectual process. On the contrary, the patient feels and sees the difference between now and then, and tries as well as he can to adapt himself. Perhaps he will even believe himself perfectly adapted, since he may be able to grasp the situation intellectually, but that does not prevent his emotions from lagging far behind his intellectual insight… (101:312) Jung
“The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis, but how to bear it. His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self, the “other” whom, from childish laziness or fear, or for some other reason, he was always seeking to exclude from his life. In this way, as Freud rightly says, we turn the ego into a “seat of anxiety” which it would never be if we did not defend ourselves against ourselves so neurotically. (95:360) Jung
“The childhood experience of a neurotic is not, in itself, negative; far from it. It becomes negative only when it finds no suitable place in the life and outlook of the adult. The real task of analysis, it seems to me, is to bring about a synthesis between the two. (82:564) Jung
“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He will be better advised to put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart thru the world. There, in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchange, Socialist meetings, churches, revivalists gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.” (104c:409) Jung “The labors of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed toward that hidden and as yet unmanifest “whole” man, who is at once the greater and the future man. But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors. It is on this longissima via that we meet with those experiences which are said to be “inaccessible.” Their inaccessibility really consists in the fact that they cost us an enormous amount of effort: they demand the very thing we most fear, namely the “wholeness” which we talk about so glibly and which lends itself to endless theorizing, though in actual life we give it the widest possible berth. It is infinitely more popular to go in for “compartment psychology,” where the left-hand pigeon-hole does not know what is in the right.” (72:6) Jung
“We have experienced things so unheard of and so staggering that the question of whether such things are in any way reconcilable with the idea of a good God has become burningly topical. It is no longer a problem for experts in theological seminaries, but a universal religious nightmare, to the solution of which even a layman in theology like myself can, or perhaps must, make a contribution.” From Answer to Job, Jung
“Everyone who becomes conscious of even a fraction of his unconscious gets outside his own time and social stratum into a kind of solitude.” 48:258 Jung
“The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins, where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. 10:45 Jung
“It is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other hand, a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him. That is to say, even the most enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.” 7:758 Jung
“If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: he has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God.” 74:138 Jung
