Spiritual Ecology Quotes

Our ancient sources of wisdom call on human beings to rise to their highest capacity and behave in extraordinarily open and generous ways to one another, under difficult circumstances to transcend differences and create understanding across all barriers of convention and fear. This wisdom is fragile as our environment is fragile, threatened by an overwhelming material culture. I believe in a spiritual ecology. In today's world, Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions are endangered species. ~ Rodger Kamenetz

First we have to step out of our dream of separation, the insularity with which we have imprisoned ourselves, and acknowledge that we are a part of a multidimensional living spiritual being we call the world. The world is much more than just the physical world we perceive through the senses, just as we are much more than just our own physical bodies. Only as a part of a living whole can we help to heal the whole. Just as we need to work together with the outer ecosystem, we need to work together with the inner worlds. We need their support and help, their power and knowledge. The devas understand the patterns of climate change better than we do, because they are the forces behind the weather and the winds. Just as plant devas know the healing powers of plants (and taught the shamans and healers their knowledge), so are there more powerful devas that know and guide the patterns of evolution of the whole planet. ~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

How can we speak about sustainability without speaking about the Sustainer? ~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

The pollution of the outward environment we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence
of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed. I think that this is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man's self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom.
There is a discrepancy here. We want to eliminate the measurable pollution, but we don't consider the pollution of man's soul and his creaturely form ... he must acknowledge himself as a creature and realise that there must be a sort of inner purity to his creatureliness: spiritual ecology, if you will.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press, 1997, pp. 230-231 ~ Pope Benedict XVI

I am exactly who I am choosing to be. Should I change my choice, the universe will always be there to assist me. ~ Jennifer Sodini

I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them. ~ Neil Young

There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns. [ ... ] A man cannot get a coat or a pair of boots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? ~ John Stuart Mill

Centered, open, and diverse, the universes correspondence to your hopes and dreams is the deliverance of your foremost thoughts and actions. Energetically you can create and destroy your immediate set of circumstances under the same laws. Posed as friends and foes, you will have obstacles, ones in which you must go through, over, under and aside sometimes to overcome. These are the stepping stones to your future reality. Overcome that which has weakened your state of mind and conquer the thoughts and actions that you have let lead your life. ~ Will Barnes

Looked at from a spiritual standpoint, our discomfort in any given situation provides a signal that we are out of alignment with spiritual law and are being given an opportunity to heal something. ~ Colin C. Tipping

Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe. ~ Stefan Zweig

Once we have forgiven, however, we get a new freedom to forget. This time forgetting is a sign of health; it is not a trick to avoid spiritual surgery. We can forget because we have been healed. But even if it is easier to forget after we forgive, we should not make forgetting a test of our forgiving. The test of forgiving lies with healing the lingering pain of the past, not with forgetting the past has ever happened. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

He who believes in Me ... out of his heart will flow ... " John 7:38 Jesus did not say, "He who believes in Me will realize all the blessings of the fullness of God," but, in essence, "He who believes in Me will have everything he receives escape out of him." Our Lord's teaching was always anti-self-realization. His purpose is not the development of a person - His purpose is to make a person exactly like Himself, and the Son of God is characterized by self-expenditure. If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain but what He pours through us that really counts. God's purpose is not simply to make us beautiful, plump grapes, but to make us grapes so that He may squeeze the sweetness out of us. Our spiritual life cannot be measured by success as the world measures it, but only by what God pours through us - and we cannot measure that at all. ~ Oswald Chambers

The pledge of the Spirit is the foretaste of God as a sample and guarantee of the full taste of God. God has put Himself into us as a kind of down payment or foretaste so that we can taste Him within. ~ Witness Lee

Respect those elder to you in years, in knowledge and spiritual attainment and act with love and compassion with those who are younger or less fortunate than you. ~ Radhe Maa

Everyone belongs to God. Rather black or white there is no colour for God. He loves all. ~ Saira Hafeez

A man may have metaphysical certainty without having "faith", that is, without this certainty residing in his soul as a continuously active presence. But if metaphysical certainty suffices on doctrinal grounds, it is far from being sufficient on the spiritual plane where it must be completed and brought to life by faith. Faith is nothing other than the adherence of our whole being to Truth, whether we have a direct intuition of this Truth or an indirect notion. It is a misuse of language to reduce "faith" to "belief"; it is the opposite that is true: belief--or theoretical knowledge--must be changed into the faith "that moves mountains". For the Apostles there was no difference in practice between an idea and its spiritual validation; they did not separate theory from realization, hence the word "love" as a way of indicating all conformity to divine Truth.

He who has faith acts as if he were in the presence of what he believes--or knows--to be true. One can neither cast doubt on the fact that simple belief is already an adherence to Truth nor affirm that metaphysical certainty by itself implies an adherence of our whole being; for every man, whether he "knows" or "believes", perfection is "to worship God as if you saw Him, and if you do not see Him, He nonetheless sees you". ~ Frithjof Schuon

A pastor really needs to be broken before God every day, or he will break up the church of God with his willfulness or let it slip into spiritual death through his sloth. ~ C. John Miller

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. ~ Ann Druyan

Not everyone can have the same devotion. One exactly suits this person, another that. Different exercises, likewise, are suitable for different times, some for feast days and some again for weekdays. In time of temptation we need certain devotions. For days of rest and peace we need others. Some are suitable when we are sad, others when we are joyful in the Lord. ~ Thomas A Kempis

More than ever, we have big houses and broken homes, high incomes and low morale, secured rights and diminished civility. We excel at making a living but often fail at making a life. We celebrate our prosperity but yearn for a purpose. We cherish our freedoms but long for connection. In an age of plenty, we feel spiritual hunger. ~ Craig Gross

I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect. ~ Bruno Latour

The mystery of grace is the power of God. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All is contained within the silence of death, the quietest and the loudest sound in the universe. ~ Forrest Curran

So do not expect always to get an emotional charge or a feeling of quiet peace when you read the Bible. By the grace of God you may expect that to be a frequent experience, but often you will get no emotional response at all. Let the Word break over your heart and mind again and again as the years go by, and imperceptibly there will come great changes in your attitude and outlook and conduct. You will probably be the last to recognize these. Often you will feel very, very small, because when your eyes close for the last time in death, and never again read the Word of God in Scripture you will open them to the Word of God in the flesh, that same Jesus of the Bible whom you have known for so lng, standing before you to take you for ever to His eternal home. ~ Geoffrey Thomas

Because, from the beginning , God said, 'I'm gonna put this world into your hands. If I run everything, then that's not you.' So we were created with a piece of divinity inside us, but with this thing called free will, and I think God watches us everyday, lovingly, praying we will make the right choices. ~ Mitch Albom

Scriptures are as 'helping problem'. Scriptures only give directions. Scriptures are like a thermometer. Can you grind a thermometer and give it as medicine? ~ Dada Bhagwan

As much as I can, I avoid using the word "spiritual" altogether. I find it neither useful nor necessary nor appropriate in my work at the hospital bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and healthcare, nor in other settings in which we work[.] [T]o my mind, the vocabulary of spirituality creates more practical problems than it solves. [...] The concept of spirituality can narrow our thinking rather extend it.
[...] Perhaps ultimately, spiritual means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous, If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. It is the inner experience which counts. And you have to be there for it. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Don't worry about losing yourself helping others; you find yourself there too. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Even though our physical reality is more like an illusion, it is still the "illusion" that helps us evolve, so we should take it seriously. Giving up in life or committing suicide because we found out that our reality works like an illusion is not going to help us evolve back to Creation. Committing suicide is one of the worst things you can do because it can cause your soul to become stuck on Earth with little awareness of what is happening. You can be stuck in an illusionary reality that seems to keep replaying itself for centuries. Some of us like to refer to these lost souls as ghosts. Being in this lost state of awareness will not free you from pain and suffering, but will stunt your spiritual evolution which is one of the worst things you can do to your soul. DNA creates our external reality because ~ Pao Chang

You can't just run away from uncomfortable situation. You have to develop new strategy to graciously handle the situation. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All my life I have felt a great kinship with the madman and the criminal. Practically all my life I have dwelt in big cities; I am unhappy, uneasy, unless I am in a big city. My feeling for Nature is limited to water, mountain and desert. These three form a trine which is more imperative, for me, than any spiritual alimentation. But in the city I am aware of another element which is beyond all these in power of fascination: the labyrinth. To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home. ~ Henry Miller

In this tale of Mago Castle, I found the part about the Vow of Restoration deeply moving, for it shows us what human beings-deep down inside- really want to become and where they want to return. Humans are fundamentally spiritual being. That is why they ceaselessly thirst for divinity and seek to become one with it. ~ Ilchi Lee

Do you know where the dead spirits depart to? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs. ~ Salman Rushdie

Courage is the first spiritual quality that you need to have. ~ Paulo Coelho

God has such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby's face. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Art is the opposite of dissipation, in the physical and spiritual sense of the word: it is concentration, desire that seeks incarnation. ~ Octavio Paz

Each of us at our root is consciousness, and in the highest of the spiritual realms life and form become light. I experienced this in an OBE in which I went to the outer ring of the source of creation. ~ Belsebuub

In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is already there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off from things as they really are. ~ Colin Gunton

Any serious man or woman in search of spiritual ideas will find a surprising challenge and an authentic source of inspiration and intellectual nourishment in the writings of Paul Brunton. ~ Jacob Needleman

If you're in a spiritual slump, let me give you a prescription: go on a mission trip.33 There is no better or sure way of coming out of the cage of routine. It's a cure-all. ~ Mark Batterson

Activating spiritual solutions means converting inner thoughts and feelings from discord and disharmony to love. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles of our feet. Such fantasies insulate us for a time; yet in ten thousand ways reality intrudes, and our lives become anxious scurrying, quiet desperation, confusing melodrama. ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

We can imagine how to create and be creative on a beach in a cosmic sky. No grain of sand is merely just sandy; with imagination at hand the sand can become whatever you fancy. ~ Jennifer Sodini

The mystery of the world is revealed only to the person who can look upon the material world with his physical eyes and simultaneously has the spiritual vision necessary to see the unseen spiritual world. One who knows both Matter and Spirit is thus the true knower, and is a spiritually intelligent being. ~ Awdhesh Singh

There was...the discrepancy between what one expected of the accomplished medieval scholar (and, later, the penetrating exponent of theological and spiritual matters) and the robust, no-nonsense, unmistakably strident man, clumsy in movement and in dress, apparently little sensitive to the feelings of others, determined to cut his way to the heart of any matter with shouts of distinguo! before re-shaping it entirely. One quickly felt that for him dialectic supplied the place of conversation. Any general remarks were of an obvious and even platitudinous kind; talk was dead timber until the spark of argument flashed. Then in a trice you were whisked from particular to fundamental principles; thence (if you wanted) to eternal verities; and Lewis was alert for any riposte you could muster. It was comic as well as breathtaking; and Lewis would see the comedy as readily as the next man. ~ Jocelyn Gibb

Speech' is such a thing that if handled [used] correctly, it encompasses all the major vows (mahavrats). ~ Dada Bhagwan

The heart is always the place to go. Go home into your heart, where there is warmth, appreciation, gratitude and contentment ~ Ayya Khema

I will go forward ... I will smile at the rage of the tempest, and ride fearlessly and triumphantly across the boisterous ocean of circumstance ... And the 'testimony of Jesus' will light up a lamp that will guide my vision through the portals of immortality, and communicate to my understanding the glories of the Celestial kingdom. ~ Eliza R. Snow