religion

I've never thought there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it.

The "more" of Christianity is a myth; a deceitful illusion designed to keep you busy and running in circles, always seeking but never finding, always learning but never coming to the knowledge of the Truth__ carrot on a stick, if you will.

He who neglects to pray alone and in private, however assiduously he frequents public meetings, there gives his prayers to the wind.

Whenever you can__ balance what you see with what you believe you have conflict.

An orchestra of temple bells and chanting erupted suddenly like a pleasing drizzle.

How can you expect to dwell with God forever, if you so neglect and forsake him here?

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn__ see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man__ whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony.

Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional __he more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.

That__ where thinking started, where thinking stopped, where all her prayers so long ago had dried up. She no longer prayed, nor even dreamed of changing her father. Her dreams now played variations on the theme of escape. And they were nothing more than that __ust dreams, just play. She__ been alone at the end of her dreams so many times before and never had God helped her escape her father, because God couldn__, because she would never escape her need to love him.

True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about __nowing God,_ they mean more than, __ understand what you__e saying about God,_ but also, __t fits my experience of Him.

Prayer is better than pills.

When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such burgeoning of possibility causes even their Memory to be lightened and redeemed. The scales fall from their eyes and they wait on their Father with the same childlike wonder that watches a sunrise to see what might happen this time.

A man actually has two Gods. The one, created him and the other, he created. Nature is not the first God but the first God exists in and as a part of the nature; a man with the help his reason creates a God against the forces of nature that are perceived to be as threat, hence the second God. The second God is the property of an individual mind that created it. A child has no reason and hence it has no second God; but it has the first God not yet known to it because the fear is not felt by the child! The first God is felt and known due to the fear ingrained in the instinct and the second God is the surrender and prayer brought out by the reason!

All over India, all over the world, as the sun or the shadow of darkness moves from east to west, the call to prayer moves with it, and people kneel down in a wave to pray to God. Five waves each day - one for each namaaz - ripple across the globe from longitude to longtigude. The component elements change direction, like iron filings near a magnet - towards the house of God in Mecca.

I find that when I get casual in my relationships with divinity and when it seems that no divine ear is listening and no divine voice is speaking, that I am far, far away. If I immerse myself in the scriptures the distance narrows and the spirituality returns. I find myself loving more intensely those whom I must love with all my heart and mind and strength, and loving them more, I find it easier to abide their counsel.

There comes a point where you need to lose your religion in order to restore your relationship.