“…I had taken an overdose of information and had lost my appetite for the unknown…” Richard S. Sandor MD, “On Death and Coding,” Parabola Spring 1993
“The assumption of being an individual is our greatest limitation.” Pir Vilayat Khan.
“In Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his journey from Florida to the Pacific, between the years 1528 and 1536, he tells how the Indians came to him and his companions asking them to cure the sick. The two white men were themselves half starved, lost and filled with blank despair but the Indians felt that being white (as white was a sacred power to the natives), they had superhuman power and could use it if the wanted to. Cabeza de Vaca felt that they had no such power. ‘But we had to heal them or die,’ he wrote. ‘So we prayed for strength. We prayed on bended knees and in an agony of hunger.’ Then they blessed each ailing Indian, and saw that the sick were being healed! ‘Truly it was to our amazement that the ailing said they were well. Being Europeans, we thought we had given away to doctors and priests our ability to heal. But here it was, still in our possession…It was ours after all; we were more than we thought we were…To be more than I thought I was–a sensation utterly new to me.'” From More Than We Are, by Margueritte Harmon Bro
“What stuff is the soul made of? The question is as meaningless as asking what stuff citizenship or Wednesdays are made of. The soul is a holistic concept. It is not made of stuff at all. Where is the soul located? Nowhere. To talk of the soul as being in a place is as misconceived as trying to locate the number sever, or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Such concepts are not in space at all.” Physicist Paul Davies, from God and the New Physics.
“If our minds can manifest non-locally in all the ways we have mentioned–-dreams, visions intuitions, and so on–why are we not more aware of these types of experiences? Why are they not more common? Philosopher William Irwin Thompson suggests the reason is that we are suffering a kind of collective hypnosis, a cultural trance, that prevents us from seeing things the way they really are. ‘We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,’ he states. ‘We cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true…reality of our condition is invisible to us.” Larry Dossy, Recovering the Soul, pg. 37.
“God, whom we try to apprehend by the groping of our lives–-that self-same God is as pervasive and perceptible as the atmosphere in which we are bathed. He encompasses us on all sides, like the world itself. What prevents you, then from enfolding him in your arms? Only one thing: your inability to see him.” St. Paul
“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say; Sanctity is the state about which theology has nothing to say.” W. H. Auden.
“I can no longer make a strong distinction between the brain and the body…the research findings…indicate that we need to start thinking about how consciousness can be projected into various parts of the body.” Candace B. Pert, Former Chief of Brain Chemistry National Institute of Mental Health. (Quoted by Larry Dossy)
“Unless the one for whom we pray is of one mind with us in trying to find the power within, it is almost always easier to pray for him when he is asleep. Perhaps one reason that praying at night seems more effective is because sleeping people are easier to reach…Whatever the unconscious mind may be, it is more accessible in sleep. And if the part of the mind we call the unconscious is, as some believe, the mind of the soul which does not disintegrate at death, then we are dealing with a highly important aspect of personality. From practical experience again, many doctors say that if the idea of health can be got into the unconscious mind of a patient the organs will begin to build to pattern. Margueritte Harmon Bro, More Than We Are.
“For most of us beginners praying for another person’s health is a dangerous business. The disease may be cured and he person may be worse off than he was; it almost seems as if the disease has to work itself out of the body in some fashion and that if it is halted in this method it has chosen it will find some other way to work. Jesus healed safely, completely, because he could say, ‘Thy sins are forgiven.’ In the long run there may not be much use in imparting health to others or in accepting it for ourselves unless the heart, too, is cleansed. These are matters on which we have too little experimental data, although the present finds of depth psychology and psychiatry are beginning to shed some light.” Margueritte Harmon Bro, More Than We Are.
“One who understands the laws of harmony knows how to dissolve a dissonance. Disease is disharmony. There is plenty of testimony of experience to postulate that an individual can be lifted through prayer into that harmony which precludes disease. And to postulate further that an individual in tune with perfect love, or God, can also bring back into harmony another whose deep desire is in accord…As beginners we may be safeguarded from doing harm with our prayers for healing by emphasizing two factors–our selflessness and our absolute desire to see the will of God made manifest. Praying for any kind of specifics is difficult because we have no way of knowing whether the need which seems obvious really is the basic need.” “Unless the one for whom we pray is of one mind with us in trying to find the power within, it is almost always easier to pray for him when he is asleep. Perhaps one reason that praying at night seems more effective is because sleeping people are easier to reach…Whatever the unconscious mind my be, it is more accessible in sleep. And if the part of the mind we call the unconscious is, as some believe, the mind of the soul which does not disintegrate at death, then we are dealing with a highly important aspect of personality. From practical experience again, many doctors say that if the idea of health can be got into the unconscious mind of a patient the organs will begin to built to pattern.” Margueritte Harmon Bro, More Than We Are.
“Although some illness is caused by moral and religious failure, Jesus did not have any illusion that therefore it all originates in such failure. Nor did he hold that once people stepped off the way toward wholeness and were suffering for it, they ought to be made to endure the full burden of their mistake…While it is easy to see how people arrive at the idea that sickness can be caused by defiance of or unconscious trespass against God, this is no reason, as the book of Job so ably shows, to assert that all sickness is so caused…Jesus…specifically rejected the theory that all that ails humanity is caused by trespass against God…When he saw a need to speak of sin in connection with a healing, he did not say that this was the sole cause of the person’s trouble. Jesus seemed to believe that a primary cause of sickness was a force of evil loose in the world which was hostile to God and the divine way. He believed that people sometimes fell into the hands of this power, which then exerted a destructive influence in their lives, morally, psychologically, and physically. You may call this force Satan, the devil, evil spirits, demons, autonomous complexes, or what you will; its exact source was never fully accounted for. That this understanding, this knowledge of the reality of such errant destructiveness is shot through the teaching and actions of Jesus…The coming of Jesus…wipes out once and for all the notion that God put sickness upon people because of divine wrath. Jesus’ ministry of healing embodies the exact antithesis of this idea. He did not inquire whether people were good or bad, whether they had repented or were reforming, before he healed them. He loved women and men just as they were and wanted to help them out of their misery. ..Jesus’ attitude appears to have been: once these people are healed, perhaps they will reflect and come to their senses, but as long as they are sick and suffering it is difficult for them to reach out to the loving God…There is no hint of sitting back to wait for suffering to teach human beings their lesson and bring them back to relation with God; Jesus knew that healing could accomplish God’s will in people far better.” Morton Kelsey, Psychology, Medicine and Christian Healing, pg. 76-78
“The Christian who goes around saying that sickness is God’s will has not fully understood the life and teaching of Christ…Can you imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying to anyone, “Oh, go your way and make something of your sickness! It is better for you than the mischief you have been getting into.” Morton Kelsey, Psychology, Medicine and Christian Healing, pg. 80.
“If you follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you arc living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” The Power of Myth Joseph Campbell
“Gratitude for the past, service to the present, responsibility for the future…” Huston Smith’s definition of the essence of Buddhism.
“I don’t know Who–or what–put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone–or Something–and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back,’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow.’ Led by the Ariadne’s thread of my answer through the labyrinth of Life, I came to a time and place where I realized that the Way leads to a triumph which is a catastrophe, and to a catastrophe which is a triumph, that the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depth of humiliation. After that, the word “courage” lost is meaning, since nothing could be taken from me…” Dag Hammerskjold.
