42 quotes found
"the search for necessary truths, truths that are not only true, but they couldn’t have been false."
"Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of 'interpretation' I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme."
"My ultimate intuitive clue in philosophy is that "God is love" and that the idea of God is definable as that of the being worthy to be loved with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and entire being."
"I think my great book is Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song."
"Do you remember which way I was heading?"
"The secret of my success is longevity."
"All things, in all their aspects, consist exclusively of 'souls', that is, of various kinds of subjects, or units of experiencing, with their qualifications, relations, and groupings, or communities."
"God thus excludes the world; he is only its cause; in no sense is he effect, of himself or anything else. Pantheism (better, "pandeism," for again it is not really the theos that is described) means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there, is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects."
"God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment)."
"These distinctions make sense only when AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is assumed (hence Spinoza's failure, who assumed mere A). Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created – this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as well, are implicitly talking about."
"In Plato’s Republic one finds the proposition: God, being perfect, cannot change (not for the better, since "perfect" means that there can be no better; not for the worse, since ability to change for the worse, to decay, degenerate, or become corrupt, is a weakness, an imperfection). The argument may seem cogent, but it is so only if two assumptions are valid: that it is possible to conceive of a meaning for "perfect" that excludes change in any and every respect and that we must conceive God as perfect in just this sense."
"The idea of revelation is the idea of special knowledge of God, or of religious truth, possessed by some people and transmitted by them to others. In some form or other the idea is reasonable. In all other matters people differ in their degree of skill or insight. Why not in religion?"
"In all countries and in all historical times there have been individuals to whom multitudes have looked for guidance in religion. Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, Moses, Zoroaster, Shankara, Jesus, Muhammed, Joseph Smith, and Mary Baker Eddy were such individuals. New examples are to be found within the lives of many of us. Pure democracy or sheer equalitarianism in religious matters is not to be expected of our human nature. Some distinction between leaders or founders and followers or disciples seems to be our destiny. But there is a question of degree, or of qualification. To what extent, or under what conditions, are some individuals, or perhaps is some unique individual, worthy of trust in religious matters? It is in the answer to this question that mistakes can be made."
"[T]he traditional idea of divine perfection or infinity is hopelessly unclear or ambiguous and that persisting in that tradition is bound to cause increasing skepticism, confusion, and human suffering. It has long bred, and must evermore breed, atheism as a natural reaction."
"The reward for living is the living itself."
"No one in my family disbelieved in religion, and no one disbelieved in evolution, either."
"What we need is to make a renewed attempt to worship the objective of God, not our forefathers' doctrines about him."
"Musicians who have listened to birds believe [that birds derive pleasure from singing] much more than ornithologists, who are terrified of being accused of anthropomorphism... Having studied thousands of hours of birdsong from around the world, I am convinced some species possess an aesthetic sense, however limited compared to ours. It is part of human egotism to believe that only we have active minds."
"The world has too many automobiles and televisions. Now the standard is there should be one car and TV for every person. This is not healthy for the environment or our souls."
"Hitler made it impossible to keep believing in pacifism, which was one of the many terrible things he did to the world."
"[W]e live in a century in which everything has been said. The challenge today is to learn which statements to deny."
"I had a happy, idyllic, old-fashioned childhood. Go to the town where I spent that childhood, you will not find my happy hours there. Yet they remain definite constituents of a divine reality about which true statements can still be made. My happy childhood was a gift my parents and the world offered to God."
"Too many intellectuals look down on religion and think it will go away. God is not going to go away. There are far more religious people in the world today than when I was born."
"What does it mean, then, to become part of God’s work in the world? What does it mean to live a Christian life? One way to answer that question is to look back into the life of the Trinity and the original creation. God made us to ever increasingly share in his own joy and delight in the same way he has joy and delight within himself. We share his joy first as we give him glory (worshipping and serving him rather than ourselves); second, as we honor and serve the dignity of other human beings made in the image of God’s glory; and third, as we cherish his derivative glory in the world of nature, which also reflects it. We glorify and enjoy him only as we worship him, serve the human community, and care for the created environment. Another way to look at the Christian life, however, is to see it from the perspective of the final restoration. The world and our hearts are broken. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was an infinitely costly rescue operation to restore justice to the oppressed and marginalized, physical wholeness to the diseased and dying, community to the isolated and lonely, and spiritual joy and connection to those alienated from God. To be a Christian today is to become part of that same operation, with the expectation of suffering and hardship and the joyful assurance of eventual success."
"The work of the Christ is that of raying out Divine love and encouragement to every creature in existence. The living Christ is perpetually occupied with the offices of his Christship. One of its most vital services is that of bringing human beings into a state of regeneration and self-conquest. Christ will not finish His work until the whole planet and all of humanity is brought to its highest degree of development."
"Christ's mission is to release the divine into our conscious knowing. He awakens the impulse in humanity to rise above his lower nature and be aware of his higher nature that dwells within."
"The Christ Spirit is really the aura of Christ Jesus extending to and including every portion of the earth. Whatever is Christ-like in essence, quality, mentality and conduct adds to the content of the ever-expanding Christ Spirit. We might also consider it as a tremendous reservoir of Light, which encircles the earth, whose function is to bless, to redeem, to spiritualize, to love and to heal all who make prayerful requests in the name of the Christ Spirit."
"Our Lord Jesus evolved just as each of us has. He was human, very human in the beginning of His evolution, but (throughout his physical incarnations) He more strangely than anyone else, more quickly had the power of excellence, that supreme ability to surrender Himself and to give himself to that which is higher than anyone else that has evolved through the earth. So, it was because of this excellence, because of this unusual ability, that Jesus, or better our Lord Emmanuel the only begotten Son, it means in esoteric fact, that our Lord was the only one who had this quality to become the Christ Officiant for our planet."
"Mysticism is the art of the practice of divine union. It is the soul's endeavor to draw nearer to God. Mysticism is the path of the heart, the path of love, the path of reverence into the citadel of enlightenment."
"Mysticism is the search for and recovery of our oneness with God."
"We are here in life for but one reason-to learn to climb through ascensions of consciousness into the true Selfhood which is within us-the Selfhood which belongs to the eternal, the Selfhood which is our real nativity, our home in God's spirit."
"Life's drama of incarnation consists of one's eventual discovery of their inherent destiny. We are a creation of the Supreme Spirit in whose seed of divinity , Godhood, like the Godhood of Jesus, shall come into fruition."
"As purity in motivation is matched by the will to penetrate the barriers that separate one from God, then the wonderful event takes place; one begins to know and see God."
"Christ's entire ministry can be summarized in just two words, live love."
"When humans face testings and tragedy, they should remember the angels who are always standing ready to lend their celestial assistance, comfort and council. You should never feel lonely, neglected, fearful, or defeated when you remember that there are the shining ones. They are watching with keen interest and a great desire to help to raise you, to stimulate you into contact with your own superior inner resources."
"Next to worship and realization of God and the Lord Christ, awareness of the Angelic Kingdom has helped and inspired me more than any other single reality my recognition has touched."
"Take in everything before you and let your eyes be drenched with beauty, and as you love beauty in a reverent way it becomes a sacrament to you."
"You'll never make the friendship of nature until you can approach her with the idea of learning all that she has, all that she is, all that she serves from the inner worlds outwards to this physical vestment. The more wildflowers you learn the names of the richer you are. The more birds you can identify the finer character you possess and the more you can love as well as appreciate and seek to protect beauty in every form, the higher and nobler becomes your character. For nature teaches your character to expand and it reaches out to your very soul to make it as pure as it is."
"The person who misses this adventure of kinship with the beauty that is to be found in nature temples, and fails to make the acquaintance of the creatures that are in those temples, misses so much."
"Lack of will power has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability."
"How inordinate our fear of suffering and dying is. We’re so afraid of losing a life that is in a certain sense incapable. We’re not going to be able to keep our life on earth forever. That’s the reality. On the other hand, it confronts Catholic Christians with the sense that we are more afraid of physical suffering and physical death than we are of spiritual suffering and spiritual death through mortal sin and the divine life which is so precariously weakened through venial sins and those kinds of vices that we merely reduce to bad habits. And so to me, it’s a kind of a wake up call, not only for us as a society, but especially for us as a church to recognize the sacredness of human life, but to recognize the greater sacredness of a divine life that is obviously superior but much more vulnerable."
"Catholics are accused of being obsessed with death, but we’re not. What we’re obsessed with is resurrection. So much so that when St. Paul preached in Athens, the philosophers thought he was preaching two new gods, Jesus and Resurrection. Our acceptance of death, our preparation for it, strikes people who have a disordered fear of death as obsession. But we recognize that life is not ended with death; it’s changed for the better. Death is the gateway to that something better. So, of course we want to help people prepare for their death as best as they can and celebrate the deaths of those we believe have entered into glory. That’s not obsession. That’s right priorities."