“Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. “We are too ego-centered,” Suzuki tells Cage. “The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.” Adolescent love gives us the first chance to break the shell. Sexual love makes the ego lose itself in the object it loves. “When the ego-shell is broken and the ‘other’ is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite.…The religious consciousness is now fully awakened, and all the possible ways of escaping from the struggle or bringing it to an end are most earnestly sought in every direction. Books are read, lectures are attended, sermons are greedily taken in, and various religious exercises or disciplines are tried.” Suzuki says that sexual love is a vehicle of liberation? A crack in the ego shell? A path to the infinite? At this point, if I were Cage, I would buy the book and take it home.” EgoZenSexual LoveSpiritual Seeking Author:Kay Larson
“Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. ... It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance.” LoveLongingOnenessCommunionCeltic SpiritualitySpiritual Seeking Book:Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong Source: Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong
“Closing the last chapter of our personal history and taking the first step on the Journey will come with the recognition of the futility of spiritual seeking.” Journey Personal HistorySpiritual Seeking Author:Frank M. Wanderer
“The Wanderer then leaves behind the spiritual seeker, with all the accumulated knowledge and lofty spiritual experience, and takes the first step on the Journey.” JourneyWandererSpiritual Seeking Author:Frank M. Wanderer
“Every spiritual seeker is a prisoner of time. . . .We are all of us prisoners of the time in which we live. That is a place of commonality where she [Clare of Assisi], in her time, and we in ours, can meet in friendship. And more than friendship, it is where we can reclaim life—our true life—amid a world gone amuck.” FriendshipSpiritual Seeking Author:Wendy Murray