Quote of the Week 104 - Journey of Awareness

It has taken me thirty years of hard discipline to come to a cognitive plateau in which don Juan’s statements are recognizable and their validity is established beyond the shadow of a doubt. I know now that human beings are creatures of awareness, involved in an evolutionary journey of awareness, beings indeed unknown to themselves, filled to the brim with incredible resources that are never used.
-- Carlos Castaneda

Quote of the Week 103 - Laughter

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

--Mark Twain

The four solemn Zen vows:

“Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to transform them.

Reality is boundless, I vow to perceive it.

The awakened way is inexhaustible, I vow to embody it!”

The four solemn Zen vows, revised by Michael Dobbs, director of a Zen Center on Long Island and a member of the Order of Disorder, (OD or “odd” for short), a loose alliance of Zen practitioners with clowning skills:

“Creations are numberless, I vow to count them.

Delusions are inexhaustible, as if you hadn’t noticed.

Reality is boundless, and so are parts of Long Island.

The OD way is unavoidable; what were we chanting about?”

--Taken from August 2009 issue of Ode Magazine

Quote of the Week 102 - Bill Maher

People have come up to me and told me they get my criticism of religion. They tell me they are spiritual, not religious. I didn’t get what that meant. But then it came to me what it meant. It meant they weren’t afraid to die.

— Bill Maher

Quote of the Week 101 - Carole Lynne

"I am now in my sixties. I still have a deep love of God, but I do not see the personified God I saw at age thirteen. He is not an old man sitting up in heaven directing me. In fact, the God of my understanding is not a he or a she and has no personality as we human beings think of personality. I see God as Cosmic Energy — Spiritual Light. God is Divine Consciousness far beyond my human comprehension. I do not have adequate understanding or words to accurately describe God. I still have a love of Jesus, but I see Jesus in a different context than I did as a child. For me, Jesus remains in my heart, but as one of the greatest spiritual teachers, healers, and mediums who ever lived. I believe the spirit of Jesus still guides us. And I still believe Jesus is a son of God, but he is a son of God as we are all sons and daughters of God. I have come to value not only Jesus, but also many other great spiritual teachers, such as Buddha and Gandhi.”

“If God is beyond Human comprehension and we have no adequate words to describe God, then how can we, as human beings, comprehend God? This question is extremely important, because as we come to understand that God is beyond our comprehension, we can begin to understand why God ­— or, as many of us say, Spirit — needs to speak to us in ways that we can comprehend: through spiritual dreams, revelations, synchronicities, and mystical experiences. As God speaks, Divine Consciousness flows through the mind of each individual soul. But because our mental perceptions differ based on our age, nationality, cultural upbringing, and possibly past-life tendencies, we do not each receive the messages from Divine Consciousness in the same way. Even though the Divine Consciousness is always the same, our perceptions of it differ. And that is as it should be.”

-- from the book Cosmic Connection, Messages for a Better World, by Carole Lynne (Ms. Lynne’s father was Jewish, her mother was Christian, and her religious upbringing was through Congregational and Presbyterian Christianity)