Thought-Provoking and Inspiring Quotes

I'm starting a thread on Integral Naked for people to share thought-provoking and inspiring quotes, and I will post them here. I'm not sure if I'll post all of them, or just ones I particularly resonate with emotionally. If anyone reading this blog is not a member of Integral Naked but wants to share, please add them as a comment to this blog entry.

OK, here goes:

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We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a Reality. We are that reality. When we understand this, we will see that we are nothing. And being nothing, we are everything. That is all.
- Kalu Rinpoche

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One of the dangers of a spiritual life is the ego’s use of a spiritual
life to escape heartbreak, to escape difficulty, to escape the repetition of the patterns of hate and revenge and…'war, to escape hell; so that a desire for transcendence becomes bigger than the willingness to let the heart open to it all. All. All of it. The full human catastrophe, as well as the full human beauty.
—Gangaji

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A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
-Soto Zen Master, Dogen

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"The insight into Christ dwelling in every other person enables one to express charity toward others with greater spontaneity. Instead of seeing only someone's personality, race, nationality, gender, status, or characteristics (wlhich you like or do not like), you see what is deepest -- one's union or potential union with Christ. You also perceive everyone's desperate need of help. The transcendent potential of most people is still waiting to be realized, and this awakens a great sense of compassion. This Christ-centered love takes us out of ourselves and brings our newly found sense of independence into relationships that are not based on dependency, as many relationships tend to be, but that are based on Christ as their center. It enables one to work for others with great liberty of spirit because one is no longer seeking one's own ego-centered goals but responding to reality as it is."

Father Thomas Keating

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This is how
I would die
into the love
I have for you:
as pieces of cloud
dissolve in sunlight.
-RUMI


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"Dwell in possibility."
Emily Dickenson

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“The personality becomes the vehicle of one’s interaction in the world, but is no longer the final source of Being.”

Baron Short, M.D., Introduction to Integral Psychiatry

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“That children do not know the reason of their desires, all the learned teachers and instructors agree. But that grownups too stumble like children on this earth, not knowing whence they come or whither they go, acting as little according to true purposes, being ruled by cakes and birch rods, no one likes to believe; yet to me it seems quite obvious.“

Johannes von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

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While we in timeless time embrace
..bodies bursting with energy
..arms legs hands fingers
..tuned to touch
..draw each to each, closer and closer
No "I" exists, no "you"
..only the "we" is present
Patterns of movement form and shift
..undulating thrusting exploding releasing
..sinking into the oceanic stillness of becoming
..One
Then the waves subside
..leaving two separate beings
..alone together
..changed and not changed

- June Singer


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This pain you think of as yours
Wells up from something much deeper than yourself,
It is Existence, not you, that is suffering,
You are a tune it is trying to play on a flawed harp -
The pain is protest, is reprimand, almost - is warning
That the instrument will not serve, that withdrawal threatens.
Then the tune that is you will cease, the universe
Be there, without you. But Existence will go on,
And the music it makes in endless others,
The music will go on. What then, is lost?
Only the self, the loved, the fleeting tune.
-John Hall Wheelock

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from wei wu wei:

Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think,
And of everything you do,
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one.


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You are willing
To take limitless blame,
So long as you
Can keep getting
A little credit.



...................



You indulge in
Self improvement

And

All you have to show for it
is an improved self.


--Ram Tzu


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"In the game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table: human beings, nature and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines."
-George Dyson

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