“To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.”
-Stephen Levine, mentioned in the book: No Recipe: Cooking as a Spiritual Practice
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Category: Quotes
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Osho, on Love
Love is spontaneous. It cannot be controlled. You cannot “make” love; you cannot do anything about it. And the more you do, the more you will miss it. You have to allow it to happen. You are not needed for it. Your presence is the hindrance. The more you are absent, the better. When you are not, love happens.
Because of their inability to be absent, modern man and woman have become incapable of love. They are only capable of doing things. The whole modern mind is based on doing. Whatsoever can be done, modern [people] can do more efficiently than any that has ever existed. Whatsoever can be done, we can do more efficiently. We are the most efficient century; we have turned everything into technology–into a problem of how to “do” it. We have developed one dimension and that is the dimension of doing, but in developing this dimension we have lost much.
At the loss of being we have learned how to do things, so that which can be done we do better than anyone–better than any society that ever existed on earth. But when the question of love comes, a problem arises because love cannot be done.
For example, meditation: we have become incapable of it, it cannot be done. Or play: we have become incapable of it, it cannot be done. Or joy, happiness: we have become incapable of them because they cannot be done. They are not acts; you cannot manipulate them. On the contrary, you have to let yourself go. Then joy happens to you, then happiness comes to you, then love enters you, then love takes possession. And because of this possession we have become afraid.
Modern [people], the modern mind, wants to possess everything and not be possessed by anything. [The modern person] wants to be the master of everything, and you can only be the master of things–not of happenings. You can be the master of a house, you can be the master of a mechanical device; you cannot be the master of anything which is alive. Life cannot be mastered; you cannot possess it. On the contrary; you have to be possessed by it. Only then is there contact with it.
Love is life, and it is greater than you. You cannot possess it. I would like to repeat it: love is greater than you; you cannot possess it. You can only allow yourself to be possessed by it; it cannot be controlled. The modern ego wants to control everything, and you become scared of whatsoever you cannot control. You become afraid, you close the door. You close that dimension completely because fear enters. You will not be in control. With love you cannot be in control….
-Osho, The Book of Secrets
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There’s strength, peace & increased faith that comes with being more spiritual. It’s a daily battle.
Trials & struggles often test your faith & spirituality & show aspects of character deficiencies. They are opportunities for deeper spiritual growth. Regardless of how you feel continue to press on.
-Talia Dyce, Nurse & Friend Extraordinaire
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Excerpt from Siddhartha
“…when you throw a stone into the water, it finds the quickest way to the bottom of the water. It is the same when Siddhartha has an aim, a goal. Siddhartha does nothing; he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the affairs of the world like the stone through the water, without doing anything, without bestirring himself; he is drawn and lets himself fall. He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal.”
—Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
“Everyone can reach their goal, if they can think, wait and fast.”
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Gratitude, From Napoleon Hill
I was astounded, when I first tried this plan of offering a prayer of thanks for what I already possessed, to discover what a vast fortune I had owned without being appreciative of it. For example, I discovered that I possessed a sound body which had never been seriously damaged by illness. I had a mind which was reasonably well balanced. I had a creative imagination through which I could render useful service to great numbers of people. I was blessed with all the freedom I desired, in both body and mind. I possessed an imperishable desire to help others who were less fortunate. I discovered that happiness, the highest aim of mankind, was mine for the taking, business depression or no business depression….It may be helpful…to take inventory of…intangible assets. Such an inventory may disclose possessions of priceless value.
-Napoleon Hill
Our health is connected to our neighbor’s health.
I heard this statement somewhere on the radio, some days ago.
It’s a reminder that we are all connected.
“Patience, understanding, and helping each other is the best thing we can do at this time” –Z, the landlord
Short video from Meg LeFauve, writer/director for Pixar Animation Studios. Here she seamlessly weaves together faith, determination, belief, vulnerability, courage through fear, and other values, talking about her career.
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An Example of Love
“Love is complete when one human being says to another:
You have wounded me and disappointed me.
You have hurt me beyond description.
But I forgive you with all my heart
because I believe you will heal me also
and I refuse to lose faith in you.
I too have not been blameless.
We need to forgive each other.“
-Anthony T. Padovano
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Belonging vs. Fitting In
“The opposite of belonging, from the research, is ‘fitting in.’ Fitting in is assessing, and acclimating. Here is what I should say, be. Here is what I shouldn’t say, here’s what I should avoid talking about. Here’s what I should dress like, look like. That’s fitting in.
Belonging, is belonging to yourself first. Speaking your truth, telling your story, and never betraying yourself for other people. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires you to be who you are. And that’s vulnerable.”
-Brené Brown
Do your best to give / bring good energy to the Family.
It’s not about the details, it’s about your perception of it.
It’s about the journey, the way. How are you experiencing the path?
Being humble and realizing that you Love everything that you Love, and you want to be Grateful for that.
It’s not about necessarily saying “Thank You”,
It’s about Appreciating what you have.
How do I honor the Path? Am I honoring the Path?
One way to honor the path is by doing the best you can do.
Honoring the family, by doing the best you can do with those connections.
Two quotes from “As a Man Thinketh” by James Allen – the gender references were made neutral:
Here is a rich person who is the victim of a painful and persistent disease as the result of gluttony. That person is willing to give large sums of money to get rid of it, but they will not sacrifice their gluttonous desires. That person wants to gratify their taste for rich and unnatural viands and have their health as well. Such a person is totally unfit to have health, because they have not yet learned the first principles of a healthy life.
… whilst aiming at a good end, this person is continually frustrating its accomplishment by encouraging thoughts and desires which cannot possibly harmonize with that end.
I started a curriculum out of necessity. Essentially it is lots of things covered, some explicitly or implicitly in the first Spark the Flame book, other items being other concepts and connections.
The content naturally formed as a curriculum, a set of guidelines of how the universe has been observed to behave, and ways we can act best.
The order of the lessons / sections are not set in stone and can plausibly change.
Right now these are rough outlines / topics for discussion within a class environmnent.
Section 1: Karma; Interconnectivity
- You get
what you give
- The universe reflects to you who you are being;
- Life as a mirror
- Boomerang
- Always see yourself in the other person’s position, because whatever you do to them, comes back to you
- Use your observation to see the direct answer that life gives to who you are being
- Good karma saves your butt when you are in trouble!
- You
cannot get away with anything
- May return in different ways (pain to another causes a proportionate pain to you, but not necessarily the same exact painful event)
- Law of
Attraction
- Thoughts and feelings attract like things,
thoughts, and feelings
- Works through mind images and feelings
- Also NLP / self-talk
- Neuroplasticity builds energies and points of
attraction into the subconscious
- You are
attracting things all the time: consciously and subconsciously
- Modify the subconscious by exerting the conscious
- You are
attracting things all the time: consciously and subconsciously
- Its more personal, the methods that work for you
- Combine all methods that work for you
- Some people use “dream books” and “vision boards”
- My way is to walk with the mindset. It sort of “burns” it, or “overlays” it into the world
- Always stay true to your greatest, loving values
- Watch your thoughts, they do not occur in a vacuum. They bring like-minded thoughts and things into your life
- Thoughts and feelings attract like things,
thoughts, and feelings
- Everything
is connected
- STF section on Interconnectivity
- This is part of why Karma and LOA can function anywhere, anytime, with anything
Section 2: Recovery, Salvation, Redemption
- ALWAYS
an opportunity for course correction
- This is the same as religions saying “God will always take you back / forgive you”
- No matter how deep in ish you have reached, you can ALWAYS make the choice to begin coming back
This was an interview by Tami Simon from Sounds True publishing.
Brené talks about alot here, but she keeps things very simple and fundamental in a way that probably most of us can immediately connect with.
A deep and beautiful talk on the healing, fulfilling, and transformative power of authentic human connections.
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Very Imperfect Beings We Are
Very imperfect beings we are.
-Myself accidentally doing a Yoda impression
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“I feel like I belong everywhere I go, no matter where it is or who I’m with, as long as I never betray myself. And the minute I become who you want me to be, in order to fit in and make sure people like me, is the moment I no longer belong anywhere. And that is hard. I mean that’s a hard practice, that’s an everyday practice.”
-Brene Brown
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The Present Moment is a Gift
The Present moment is a gift. That’s why they call it the “present.”
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
-William James
I did a public reading of my book Spark the Flame at BookCon at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City on June 2, 2018. I read from the section/chapater titled “Theory of General Positivity”, pages 46 – 49.
“Every person is sacred. Every human life is a parable, a story which has spiritual value.”
-Anthony T. Padovano
“For a growing number of physicists, the fine-tuning problem can be solved only by accepting that the entire cosmos is a single, continuous entity, working in seamless harmony like the human body. Everyone accepts that individual cells in the heart, liver, brain and so on are linked to the activity of the entire body. If you look at a cell in isolation, its relationship to the whole is lost. All you see are chemical reactions swirling in, out, and through the cell. What you cannot see is that these reactions do two things simultaneously: at the local level they keep the individual cell alive, while a t the holistic level they keep the entire body alive.”
Deepak Chopra – You are the Universe
I recently heard Deepak Chopra and Anoop Kumar both speak their opinion that “God” is the same as the infinite, which is the same as consciousness.
I found this idea interesting – here are some quotes:
“…What we call Life, really doesnt have an opposite. The opposite of birth is death, and the opposite of death is birth. But Life doesnt have an opposite.” – Anoop Kumar
“Consciousness is primary, and what we call ‘matter’ is an experience in our consciousness. Now if consciousness is primary, it’s also infinite….Not only is consciousness infinite, but the infinite has always been the ultimate description of what we call God. The more common notions, the more familiar notions, they are aspects of God. So there is infinite, but then we talk about infinite wisdom, infinite compassion, infinite mercy, infinite understanding, these are aspects of infinite. And this infinite shows up, not only in religion, but it shows up in mathematics, and philosophy, as different aspects, different approaches. Each of these is a unique perspective, and therefore each has unique data, to contribute about something that’s beyond all concepts. The more we evolve, the more we see the infinite underlying nature of all things. Call it religious, call it spiritual, call it secular, or simply the practical experience of knowing ourselves and eachother more deeply.” – Anoop Kumar
“Consciousness, or God, is all-knows, all modes of knowing, and all experiences known. Consciousness is invisible. Why? Because it has no form. But without consciousness there is no experience of that which we call visible. Consciousness is beyond perception. Why again? Because it’s formless, it’s boundless. You cannot imagine consciousness, you cant imagine God because if you imagine God it’s not God. The infinite cannot be imagined. But without consciousness there is no imagination.” – Deepak Chopra
The quotes above are from this debate on NPR.
Jim Carrey has been going through an “existential discovery” for some years
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbLsOF4avIs
“I used to be a guy who was experiencing the world, and now I feel like the world and the universe experiencing a guy.”
-Jim Carrey
I ran into this very nice talk, and included some great quotes below:
“…for a life to be meaningful, you cant keep looking at the life. You have to see how that life is placed in larger, broader context.”
“…a life that is rich in happiness and rich in meaning….theologian Frederick Buechner I think would label that: finding your calling.”
“Your calling, Buechner says, is that place where your deep gladness, and the world’s deep hunger, meets. Your deep gladness is about you, about what makes you engaged and alive.”
“Finding your calling is discovering what it is that makes you feel alive. And then taking those gifts and skills and moving them out into the world to feed the world’s hunger.”
“…the tension we feel between what we want and what the world needs, is in fact something we don’t want to eliminate, but instead we want to encourage and cultivate.”
“When the world pushes and presses and prods and occasionally pummels you, it is in those moments that you can begin to imagine something different. You need the world and all its adversity, just as desperately as the world needs you.”
“To lead a happy and meaningful life, is to understand the tension that exists between what we want and what the world needs, and to recognize that tension as the gift that it is.”
-Mark Hébert
“Happiness comes and goes. But when life is really good and when things are really bad, having meaning gives you something to hold on to.”
Emily Esfahani Smith
“Here’s the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn’t to live without any regrets…We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them.”
–Kathryn Schulz
1) Be grateful. for your Life, first thing when you wake up, and last thing when you go to sleep, every single day.
2) Interact more. with people you Love.
3) Consume inspiration. and uplifting content: books, audios, videos, events,
4) Practice meditation. every single day. At least 2 minutes a day.
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After uploading the most recent podcast, I ran into this short video of Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning:
Also found online here:
https://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning
He speaks about aiming for your greater potential to reach one’s true possibilities. Enjoy 