Quotes Tagged "freedom"
Religious people, West and East, have always tended to feel that there is a mysterious power of life in everything. In most forms of religions, the appearance of darkness and pain and death is overcome by the glorious light of goodness you have tasted in the wisdom meditation that discovers the open space-like freedom concentration. What Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus call βGodβ, or sometimes βGodheadβ, is a force of reality much like the infinite ocean-body of living joy that the great enlightened meditators experience. When a believer asserts unshakable faith in the face of the worst experience or apparent reality, she or he is reaching for connection to the deepest awareness of infinite living energy. Enlightened people do not see this boundlessness as something other than themselves. They experience themselves as one with all gods and all other beings, and they consider us all capable of becoming fully aware of our own freedom and happiness. Faith in such a possibility is a good place to begin this journey to liberation; it encourages us to set forth. But we all can move beyond faith to direct experience and full knowledge of our true state. (p. 75)
Most people think I'm crazyβI'm in a cult called happiness, I practice the religion of kindness, I'm a quack in the pseudoscience of love, I work in the field of unlimited possibilities, my diet is that of knowledge, my orientation is irrelevant, my purpose is growth, my entitlement is freedom, my motivation is joy, my evidence is my success, and my race is humankindβI still haven't figured out the crazy part.
That is what Lincoln saw in them, this love in all his friends, who held a close place in his heart, and Oscar, the one dream of his soul. He found it in them, in all of them, with their dirty pasts and their still recovering minds, in their words and in their friendship, and in their souls that spoke to each other in the mist of the clouds or the surging of the trees that knew that, in eternity, they would always find beauty. And that was an incredible world to wake up to.