Year 2013 Archive
Here we archive “Here’s A Thought”
items from the year 2013.
To return to the current year, click here.
Addional years’ archives are also accessible from the same page.
December 29, 2013
I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life.
Pope Francis
quoted in The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013
A Christmas Poem
I opened my heart
in search of food –
and found a feast of gratitude.
It felt like a sea of liquid prayer,
And in its midst –
I saw you there.
December 15, 2013
Dare to know.
Sapere aude.
December 8, 2013
It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men,
but the cleaving to
life and wealth and power.
December 1, 2013
The mind can prove as true anything it wants to believe, as false anything it doesn’t like.
Thus, of what use to a seeker is the mind’s proof?
SCN
November 24, 2013
God bless the whole world.
Without exception.
Bumper sticker seen in Bangor, Maine
November 17, 2013
As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did – except in my own imagination.
November 10, 2013
Knowing others is wisdom
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self needs strength.
He who knows he has enough is rich.
Perseverance is a sign of will power.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.
Tao Te Ching, 33
trans. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English
November 3, 2013
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
October 27, 2013
I must entreat thee further to explain
Why copy from its pattern goes awry,
For on my own I ponder it in vain.
udir convienmi ancor come l’essemplo
e l’essemplare non vanno d’un modo,
ché io per me indarno a ciò contemplo
Dante Alighieri
Paradiso 28:55-57
trans. Dorothy L Sayers & Barbara Reynolds
October 20, 2013
The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
October 13, 2013
When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery. He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
October 6, 2013
Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.
September 29, 2013
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau
September 22, 2013
I never found out much listening to myself.
In the movie Out Of The Past
September 15, 2013
A rule of thumb: If you come across a form of address for God that makes you uncomfortable, it is probably time to adopt it.
September 8, 2013
One religion is as true as another.
Robert Burton
in Anatomy of Melancholy
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical questions – are like that.
C. S. Lewis
quoted in C. S. Lewis, A Biography by A. N. Wilson
August 25, 2013
“If I Am Infinite, who are you?”
August 18, 2013
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
August 11, 2013
Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Why should we? Because our enemies – those people and those things to which we attach the label “enemy” – are indicators to us of what cleansing work we still need to do on ourselves. As the cartoon character Pogo used to say, “I have met the enemy, and he is us.” If you and I wish to have peaceful lives, we must make peace with ourselves within ourselves.
August 4, 2013
Gratitude helps you to grow and expand; gratitude brings joy and laughter into your life and into the lives of all those around you.
July 28, 2013
Don’t believe everything you think.
Bumper sticker seen in Belfast, Maine
July 21, 2013
Consciousness is the Self of which everyone is aware. No one is ever away from the Self, and therefore everyone is in fact Self-realized; only – and this is the great mystery – people do not know this, and want to realize the Self. Realization consists only in getting rid of the false idea that one is not realized. It is not anything new to be acquired. It must already exist or it would not be eternal, and only what is eternal is worth striving for.
Sri Ramana Maharshi
in The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi
July 14, 2013
What we are has no name.
SCN
July 7, 2013
In his will is our peace.
E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace.
Dante Alighieri
Divine Comedy: Paradiso III.85
quoted in Dante In Love
June 30, 2013
The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.
June 23, 2013
All paths lead nowhere. So choose a path that has heart.
Movie Backwards
June 16, 2013
Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga.
June 9, 2013
The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.
June 2, 2013
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
May 26, 2013
When you have completed ninety-five percent of your journey,
you are only halfway there.
Japanese Proverb
May 19, 2013
Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
May 12, 2013
The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated.
It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.
May 5, 2013
Father
May your name be hallowed.
May your will be done
On earth
As it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts
As we have forgiven those indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.
“Lord’s Prayer”
Gospel of Q
As suggested in The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man
April 28, 2013
I believe; help my unbelief!
April 21, 2013
Return to Me, and I will return to you.
April 14, 2013
I do not believe in God, and I am not an atheist.
April 7, 2013
We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.
March 31, 2013
I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.
March 24, 2013
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
March 17, 2013
I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.
March 10, 2013
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
March 3, 2013
We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.
February 24, 2013
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard Shaw
in “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant”
February 17, 2013
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
February 10, 2013
We come to understand that we are in a living relationship with Christ which requires us to learn the one true rule of the Master – the law of love. We learn how to apply this law to every situation. “Love God first, then love your neighbor as yourself.”
February 3, 2013
I don’t know if the vicar knows any more about God than I do.
Television series Downton Abbey
January 27, 2013
To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
January 20, 2013
Religion is not talk or doctrine or theories, nor is it sectarianism. Religion cannot live in sects and societies. It is the relation between the soul and God.
Vivekananda
see also here
January 13, 2013
We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another.
January 6, 2013
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.