Shells Spiritual Quotes

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is what is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or person who explained it to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening . . . Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece.

It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people's lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego would begin to crack open. The emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: being? What do you do with it?

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Welcome the small cracking of your hard-clodded shell, Embrace the warm sting of tears, Kiss the shadow which frightens you awake as you turn the corners of your day, Love the whole of everything, Smooth sunshine skies and Jagged edges Which all seek us out in Constant whisper and touch To say, 'hello, Beautiful. You’re alive

Out of the shell of the broken heart emerges the newborn soul.

the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego—your need to possess and control—and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous—large souled. —Sam Keen, philosopher

Everything must break open in order to live. The seed must break open in order for the tree to grow. The egg must break open in order for life to emerge. The Earth must be turned and the cloud must burst. You were never meant to stay in your shell.

There is great beauty in the notion of desire. Each of us is a child of the desire of our parents for each other. We are creatures of desire because we are creations of desire. The human heart discovers its most touching music when desire and love inform each other. When we love, we leave our separate solitudes and come toward union, where we complement each other. It is this ancient desire in every heart to discover and come home to its lost other half that awakens and activates its capacity for love and belonging. There are certain things that can happen to us only in solitude, and every life needs a rhythm of solitude in order to experience this. However, the experience of self-discovery, psychological integration, and spiritual growth can happen to us only when our desire draws us out of our shells and toward the precarious and life-giving sanctuary of another heart.

Pain is a spiritual wake-up call showing you that there are oceans you have not yet explored. Step beyond the world you know. Reach for heights that you never thought possible. Go to places you have deemed off limits. This is the time to take off the shell of your past and step into the rich possibilities of your future. God does not give us dreams that we cannot fulfill. If you want to do something great with your life-whether it's to fall madly in love, become a teacher, be a great parent-if you aspire to do something beyond what you are doing now, this is the time to begin. Trust yourself.

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.

*You are not yet in the Emerald Dream. First, you must remove your earthly shell...* the voice in his head instructed. *As you reach the state of sleep, you will slip your body off as you would a coat. Start from your heart and mind, for they are the links that most bind you to the mortal plane. See? This is how it is done...* - Chapter 4

i feel the spring breeze ruffling the new-hatched damp of my unfurling feathers; i see with eyes bleary from egg-dark the shell clinging sticky to my screaming beak.

The End is the Beginning Failure is not the end of the line, It does not mean “stop” or give up It means, take a break, Reflect, gain clarity, Redirect your energy And try again.

When we deny our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less human. We transform slowly into empty shells with smiley faces painted on them. Sad to say, that is the fruit of much of our discipleship in our churches. But when I began to allow myself to feel a wider range of emotions, including sadness, depression, fear, and anger, a revolution in my spirituality was unleashed. I soon realized that a failure to appreciate the biblical place of feelings within our larger Christian lives has done extensive damage, keeping free people in Christ in slavery.

Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. “Rowing,” he said, “is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway. Do you know what I mean, Joe?

She looks like an empty shell of a woman with her soul hovering above her. We believe in spiritual guías in Santo Domingo. Hers is her own self. I can see Mami’s soul desperately trying to find its way back into her small body.

Assumption Two: God only cares about spiritual things. To be honest, I don't even know what this means, but those elusive spiritual things have been helping Christians cop out of true holiness for centuries. We are all like accountants with wizard-like abilities, funneling our choices and goals and actions through shell corporations and off-shore banks of unrighteousness. God only cares about spiritual things? His kingdom is a spiritual kingdom? Are you kidding me? God only cares how we emote at him? That's part of it, sure, but I was pretty sure that He made physical animals and a physical man and gave him a physical job. I was pretty sure that He made a physical tree with physical fruit and told that physical man not to eat it or he would physically die. He physically ate it anyway and now we physically go into the physical ground, physically rot, and become physical plant and physical worm food. And because of this incredibly physical problem, He made things even more clear when His own Son took on physical flesh to lead a physical life that lead to a physical cross where He physically absorbed our curse, was physically tortured, and bought you and bought me and bought this whole physical world with His physical blood. If He'd wanted a spiritual kingdom, He could have saved Himself a huge amount of trouble (to say nothing of making the Greek philosophers and medieval gnostics a lot happier), by just skipping Christmas and the Crucifixion.

Acorn struggles in pain to crack the hard shell and emerge. For it senses that out there… exists more and it knows it. It feels that there is a sun, even if Acorn hasn't seen it. It has felt some warmth and energy and it aches for more.

Every time we open one door, we close another. It's lovely to spend Sunday morning with our new love, cooking breakfast and taking a walk together. But in the midst of our happiness, we may feel nostalgia for our former Sunday morning ritual of uninterrupted time alone at a favorite restaurant reading the newspaper. We need to acknowledge the presence of both excitement and loss, to feel their rhythm as they ebb and flow through a new relationship. If we try to deny our losses, they lead to resentments, a gnawing discomfort, and a desire to withdraw. Yet we also need to remind our ego that love means letting go of our entrenched rituals, of comparing, of wanting life to stay the same...Entering a relationship and living in the heart of the Beloved means our life will change, our shells will crack open and we will never be the same again.

How deaf and stupid I have been, he thought, walking on quickly. When anyone reads anything which he wishes to study, he does not despise the letters and punctuation marks, and call them illusion, chance and worthless shells, but he reads them, he studies and loves them, letter by letter. But I, who wished to read the book of the world and of my own nature, did presume to despise the letters and signs. I called the world of appearances, illusion. I called my eyes and tongue, chance. Now it is over; I have awakened.

Every unique thing in nature is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world. In geometric harmony of the cosmos there are ways that resemble, there are universal patterns, from blood vessels, to winter trees or to a river delta, from nautilus shell to spiral galaxy, from neurons in the brain to the cosmic web. A whole universe of connections is in your mind – a universe within a universe – and one capable of reaching out to the other that gave rise to it. Billions of neurons touching billions of stars – surely spiritual.

Colliding with the bright light Of my true self, My illusions scream loudly, Themselves illusions Created by other illusions, Finally knowing that Deep within me Beneath the shell Lies the sacred beauty Of my true self.

When there is total surrender, complete relinquishment of all concern with one’s past, present and future, with one’s physical and spiritual security and standing, a new life dawns, full of love and beauty; then the guru is not important, for the disciple has broken the shell of self-defense. Complete self-surrender is liberation by itself.

I absolutely know that you can, under your own steam, dissolve the shell that separates you from a higher experience of Self and a much better life. You don't need gurus or to be catapulted into super-natural experiences by dramatic events — you are becoming such a high-frequency being right here in your physical body, that what used to be meta-physical, trans-personal, and para-normal is now almost ordinary." —from Frequency: The Power of Personal Vibration

I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are to soft or downright liquid. I was seeing my shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest - your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor's, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed. Of course, there are such things as secret thoughts... but in general thoughts too are revealed. Shit, however, is not. Except for an extremely brief period of your life, when your mother is still changing your diapers, it is all yours. And since my shit at that moment must not have been all that different from what I had produced over the course of my past life, I was in that instant reuniting with my old, forgotten self, undergoing the first experience capable of merging with countless previous experiences, even those from when I did my business in the vineyards as a boy. Perhaps if I took a god look around, I would find the remains of those shits past, and then, triangulating properly, Clarabelle's treasure. But I stopped there. Shit was not my linden-blossom tea, of course not, how could I have expected to conduct my recherche with my sphincter? In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions. And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since reawakening. The ways of the Lord are infinite, I said to myself, they go even through the butthole.

Just as certain seeds require a forest fire to crack open their shells, crisis burns away our limited self-concepts, allowing our deeper nature to come forth. We must remember that our suffering carries the seed of our salvation; our problems are actually our answered prayers, and our darkness really is the light in potential.

Religion is the archrival of intimate spirituality…Religion, a tiresome system of manmade dos and don’ts, woulds and shoulds – impotent to change human lives but tragically capable of devastating them – is what is left after a true love for God has drained away. Religion is the shell that is left after the real thing has disappeared.

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and a lung. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Jealousy is natural when the Shell/ME is dominant, and if the Shell/ME is non-existent or very weak, then there is only action.

Pure. Truth is everything. If you can reach for your dreams and aspirations From a place of pure truth and honesty Then life will find a way to guide you to where you are meant to be.

For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values – a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living. Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittent of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.

We make our happiness dependent on situations outside ourselves and blame others in the process if things don’t turn out well. “In all our ‘freedom,’ we seek one thing: to be able to live without responsibility.” Kierkegaard is convinced that Christendom is nothing but a lifeless outer shell of mediocrity. “Think of a very long railway train – but long ago the locomotive ran away from it. Christendom is like this…Christendom is tranquillity – how charming, the tranquillity of not moving from the spot.

Her description of a perfect day sounds perfectly ordinary: “I will sleep long, have a relaxed breakfast. Then I’ll go out for some fresh air, chat with my husband or with friends. I might go to the theater, to the opera, or listen to a concert. If I’m rested, I might read a good book. And I would cook dinner. I like cooking!” These are the dreams of a person who had not been truly free for the last sixteen years. Though no longer young, Merkel is spry enough to enjoy the simplest of pleasures: country rambles, leisurely meals with (nonpolitical) friends, and music and books instead of charts, polls, and position papers. These pleasures will not replace the satisfaction of outsmarting a foe with her legendary stamina and command of facts. But, never one to ruminate over feelings, she will observe her own reaction to this new life with a scientist’s curiosity. In the short term, she is likely to spend time near her childhood home in the province of Brandenburg, where she first learned to love nature and which she still regards as her Heimat, or spiritual home. She’ll travel, too. Among her stated dreams is to fly over the Andes Mountains—an idealized destination; a metaphor for freedom.

Breaketh Thy oyster shell of silence, as Love shalt rise in its effulgence limpid pure tenderness to quench the spirit of Thy mind, as the fervent sublime oyster of Thy Beloved soul shalt submerge in the depth of Attainment in the Ocean of Divine Love to rescue pure Hearts to form a Blissed Pearl Of Divine Unity.

Why should you desire to compel others; why should you seek to have power— that evil, bitter, mocking thing, which has been from of old, as it is today, the sorrow and curse of the world—over your fellow-men and fellow-women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves; why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest; why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own; why should you deny in them the soul—that suffers so deeply from all constraint—and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires, of whatever kind they may happen to be? Who gave you the right, from where do you pretend to have received it, to degrade other men and women from their own true rank as human beings, taking from them their will, their conscience, and intelligence—in a word, all the best and highest part of their nature—turning them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows of the true man and women, mere counters in the game you are mad enough to play, and just because you are more numerous or stronger than they, to treat them as if they belonged not to themselves, but to you? Can you believe that good will ever come by morally and spiritually degrading your fellow-men? What happy and safe and permanent form of society can you hope to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others, or being yourselves subjected by them?

My mother’s problem is that she can’t submit to any authority. She lost her parents years ago, and she lost her husband. She takes no account of her relatives’ views—she never has—and especially not her children’s. There’s no human or spiritual discipline to which she’ll subject her will. She just has her own opinions, and they’re the only tribunal that’s permitted to judge her when she makes a mistake. Can you imagine what you would be like if you didn’t have anyone close who was capable of influencing you? Anyone to point out your flaws, to confront you when you went too far, to correct you when you did something wrong?” Miss

So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ “The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ “And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ “And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’ “And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

on this Earth, and when people from the lost world see the dwellings of God in each one of us. 4 The Operation and Manifestation of Iniquity If we could visualize the body of iniquity, it would resemble a twisted black cord in our spirit. It is made of hundreds of thick knots, with layer over layer that appear to be filthy rags, filled with lots of information and covenants that have been accumulated from generation to generation. It resembles a tailback or a shell that constantly blocks or hinders life, preventing it to flow from our spirit to our hearts and, eventually, to our minds. Iniquity produces Spiritual Deafness Many people have their spiritual ears obstructed and are unable to hear

In the course of working on ourselves, we learn in time that when we stay on the surface of ourselves, which is to say when we are identified with and operating from our outer shell—our personality—we suffer. The more asleep we are to the reality beneath our shells, the less we feel that life is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasurable. Or, in the language of the enneagram, the more fixated we are, the less we partake of the loving nature of reality, for we have lost our connection with Holy Love. Our suffering is not the result of being alone or of being in the wrong relationship, is not because we don’t have enough money or because we have too much of it, or because of anything of the sort. Nor is it because our outer surface doesn’t look as pretty as we think it should or because our personality isn’t as pleasant as we think it might be. We suffer because we are living at a distance from our depths—it’s as simple as that. The more our souls are infused with Being, the better we feel and the better life seems to us, no matter what our outer circumstances happen to be.

In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

As I began seeking more deeply—fasting, praying, and meditating upon God’s words—I started to touch places inside my heart that I had never known existed. Slowly, my hardened heart softened, restoring my spiritual vision. The outer shell of who I thought I was started to break as the mask of my ego began to melt away, unveiling a spirit I had felt from time to time, but had never fully embraced.

Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. “Rowing,” he said, “is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway. Do you know what I mean, Joe?” Joe, a bit nervous, not at all certain that he did, nodded tentatively, went back downstairs, and resumed his sit-ups, trying to work it out.

OHHHH don’t make me cry, I’m a big strong guy, I can make you laugh and I’d never tell a lie, See my muscles on my legs when I swim, I can do back spins with the force of my fins. SOOOOO don’t make me cry, I’m a big strong guy, I can make you laugh and I’d never tell lie. The muscles in my heart are tougher than my shell, To “love” makes me stronger than to lift a barbell.” Willard the Sea Turtle, The Little People Journey into the Mystic Sea

Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, "the face you had before you were born," as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial self, your absolute identify, which can never be gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

When I met Maria at Sachs' apartment in 1979, she hadn't slept with a man in close to three years. It took her that long to recover from the shock of the beating, and abstinence was not a choice so much as a necessity, the only possible cure. As much as the physical humiliation she had suffered, the incident with Jerome had been a spiritual defeat. For the first time in her life, Maria had been chastened. She had stepped over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered her sense of who she was. Until then, she had imagined herself capable of any thing: any adventure, any transgression, any dare. She had felt stronger than other people, immunized against the ravages and failures that afflict the rest of humanity. After the switch with Lilian, she learned how badly she had deceived herself. She was weak, she discovered, a person hemmed in by her own fears and inner constraints, as mortal and confused as anyone else. It took her three years to repair the damage (to the extent that it was ever repaired), and when we crossed paths at Sachs's apartment that night, she was more or less ready to emerge from her shell.

[Lena Lees describes from trance her experience of Kuan Yin]: “I see Kuan Yin. She is like Venus, statuesque and standing in front of a beautiful pink half-shell. Quickly, she walks in front of me, pointing the way. We are entering the mouth of a cave. It’s so interesting. I see stairs carved out of rock in the cave. We walk up the stairs to a door. I know somehow this is just another entrance, a doorway to another time, place. Perhaps at another historical time monks lived there. Now, I’m seeing a huge image, a beautiful statue of Kuan Yin right at the top of the mountain. There are stairs leading up to her and it is as if I’m right on location, standing alongside a group of worshipers. I feel the potency of her energy. In these places, perhaps China or Vietnam, there is a palpable sense of being immersed in and supported by her presence. There is a need by the people to know more, to pick up and accumulate wisdom. I’m suddenly feeling a need to be in that kind of energy. Suddenly it is Kuan Yin who is speaking: “Some believe I am in servitude to Buddha. However, Buddha doesn’t see it like that. We’re more like brother and sister. I’m showing, Lena, my abode, a place on earth where humans can visit me and be in my potency. Lena is looking at my statue and then at my form. There’s a difference. I come to people in many forms, forms constructed from people’s own perceptions of how I should come to them. And it is individual spiritual needs that create these unique perceptions. In the end, it does not matter what form I take.” “Kuan Yin wants me to know that I can have the most divine life imaginable,” whispers Lena, still very deep in trance. “She’ll be here until the last soul passes off the earth. She remains in deity form to assist people in transcending their materialistic nature, to help them attain their highest spiritual level.

The European dream was dead, he thought, the Europe of grand ideals was buried in the ashes of apathy. There was no brotherhood of nations, only the squalid struggle of the political and financial masters to line their own pockets, while the masses were brainwashed into a zombie-like existence under the false flag of liberty. All its values were secular and materialistic—with propagandistic jargon employed to nullify citizens from detecting the corrosion of their souls. Once Europe had professed itself to be the embodiment of a spiritual ideal. But, like a fossil, all that remained of it now was its hollow shell, the insides having rotted away during the passage of centuries.

Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings. She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag. It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling. She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave. Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light. There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.

Often, your lessons will not come easily. Suffering has always been a vehicle for deep spiritual growth. Those who have endured great suffering are generally the ones who evolve into great beings. Those who have been deeply hurt by life are generally the ones who can feel the pain of others in a heartbeat. Those who have endured adversity become humbled by life, and as a result, are more open, compassionate and real. We may not like suffering when it visits us, but it serves us so very well: it cracks the shell that covers our hearts and empties us of the lies we have clung to about who we are, why we are here and how this remarkable world of ours really functions. Once emptied, we can be refilled with all that is good, noble and true. Troubles can transform, if we choose to allow them to do so. As Joseph Campbell

There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the sandy beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one,” he would say, “We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, “Ah, it was all worth it.” --The Blue Monk of Niim

We are each warriors of our own times. When we step out of our protective shell, we each encounter forces much more powerful than we are. What we learn through testing ourselves on the combat zones of our eon becomes the textbook protocol for how we shall live out the remainder of our life. The glorious skirmishes and daunting conflicts that we encounter, and what we learn from vigorous engagements on the battlefield of time, inscribe the story of our lives. Spiritual leaders help guide us in our times of doubt and self-questioning. Recognizing the value of the mentorship of spiritual guides in their self-questing ventures, persons who endure immense adversity wish to reciprocate their love of humanity by sharing the scored story of their episodic journey through the corridors of time and relay the incisive truths they discovered to any other travelers with a willing ear.

When an animal is sick or injured he will fight for his life with every ounce of strength he has left. It is this unshakable will to live that, if man were not so "highly evolved", would also give him the fighting spirit he needs to stay alive. It is a well known fact that many people die simply because they give up and just don't care anymore. This is understandable if the person is very ill, with no apparent chance for recovery. But this often is not the case. Man has become lazy. He has learned to take the easy way out. Even suicide has become less repugnant to many people than any number of other sins. Religion is totally to blame for this. Death, in most religions, is touted as a great spiritual awakening - one which is prepared for throughout life. This concept is very appealing to one who has not had a satisfactory life; but to those who have experiences all the joys life has to offer, there is a great dread attached to dying. This is as it should be. It is this lust of life which will allow the vital person to live on after the inevitable death of his fleshy shell.

The contemporary Christian Church, precisely, has understood them in this' 'wrong way, to the letter, 'like the Jews,' exoterically, not esoterically. Nevertheless to say 'like the Jews' is an error. One would have to say 'as the Jews want.' Because they also possess an exotericism, for their masses, represented by the Torah and Talmud, and an esotericism, in the Cabala (which means: 'Received Tradition'), in the Zohar ('brightness'), the Merkaba or Chariot being the most secret part of the Cabala which only initiated rabbis know and use as the powerful tool of their magic. We have already said that the Cabala reached them from elsewhere, like everything else, in the Middle Ages, even though they tell us otherwise, using and transforming it in concordance with their Archetype. The Hasidim, from Poland, represent an exclusively esoteric sect of Judaism. Islam also has its esoteric magic, represented by Sufism and the sect of the Assassins, Hassanists, oflran. They interpret the Koran symbolically. And it was because of contact with this sect of the 'Old Man of the Mountain' that the Templars felt compelled to secede more and more from the direction of Rome, centering themselves in their Esoteric Kristianity and Mystery of the Gral. This was also why Rome destroyed them, like the esoteric Cathars (katharos = pure in Greek), the Bogomils, the Manichees and the gnostics. In the Church of Rome, called Catholic, there only remains a soulless ritual of the Mass, as a liturgical shell that no longer reaches the Symbol, which no longer touches it, no longer puts it into action. The Nordic contribution has been lost, destroyed by prejudice and the ethnological persecution of Nordicism, Germanism and the complete surrender to Judaism. Zen Buddhism preserves the esotericism of Buddha. In Japan Shinto and Zen are practiced by a racially superior warrior caste, the Samurai. The most esoteric side of Hinduism is found in Tantrism, especially in the Kaula or Kula Order. So understood, esotericism is what goes beyond the exterior form and the masses, the physical, and puts an elite in contact with invisible superior forces. In my case, the condition that paralysed me in the midst of dreaming and left me without means to influence the phenomena. The visible is symbol of invisible forces (Archetypes, Gods). By means of an esoteric knowledge, of an initiation in this knowledge, a hierarchic minority can make contact with these invisible forces, being able to act on the Symbol, dynamizing and controlling the physical phenomena that incarnate them. In my case: to come to control the involuntary process which, without knowing how, was controlling me, to be able to guide it, to check or avoid it. Jung referred to this when he said 'if someone wisely faces the Archetype, in whatever place in the world, he acquires universal validity because the Archetype is one and indivisible'. And the means to reach this spiritual world, 'on the other side of the mirror,' is Magic, Rite, Ritual, Ceremony. All religions have possessed them, even the Christian, as we have said. And the Rite is not something invented by humans but inspired by 'those from beyond,' Jung would say by the Collective Unconscious.

I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything. “So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ “The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ “And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ “And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’ “And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

Some quotes from Standing Stark: “The mind is the charioteer of experience, while the body is the vehicle that carries out the orders of its driver. The gift we have been given is the one called possibility, whose intent offers to tie all together, creating strands of a whole life rather than a disintegrated one.” “It is our own microcosmic journey that gives life meaning and weaves us into the macrocosm of existence. Life does begin with each of us. It then expands outward to touch others with how we live.” “At some time in our lives, we receive a signal to arouse from a deep sleep. If we answer the cue, we set out on a journey toward authenticity that takes us into the unknown. We begin to separate from the selves we thought we were and search for who we are.” “Set your intent and let it go. Your intent is your beginning. Worrying about the details detracts from the intent. In your strong intent, the attraction will take care of the details.” “The conscious realization I offer now is that when we learn to trust, we will be led to all we ever need. Our only job is to be awake and follow the lead.” “We can gauge the measure of truth in our lives by the lightness of our body, emotions and energy. We need only be aware in any given moment of the state of our being, and be guided. This is what we are asked to do on the spiritual path. We aren’t headed for a continuing chaotic free fall, but an order of divine nature.” “After all, if we’re on the spiritual path, we can trust that there is much we don’t know. These mysteries are hidden from us until we are ripe. The paradox is that we frantically attempt to know in order to surrender to the place of not knowing! The other paradox is that there are no mysteries because the cues are surrounding us all the time. We’re just too tied up to recognize them.” “There comes a time when we are knowingly left with the ramifications of the choices we make. While it would be comforting to think that the progressions we undertake will be painless and smooth, any change involves conflict between what was and what will be. Therein lies the opportunity for learning and alignment to an authentic life.” “Words are the shell. They feed intellectual knowledge. What lies in the middle of words is the seed that, if presented and embraced in a certain way, will take us to the place we seek.

Good manners disappear proportionately as the influence of the court and a self-contained aristocracy declines. This decrease can be observed clearly from decade to decade, if one has an eye for public events, which visibly become more and more vulgar. No one today understands how to pay homage or flatter with wit; this leads to the ludicrous fact that in cases where one must do homage (to a great statesman or artist, for example), one borrows the language of deepest feeling, of loyal and honorable decency-out of embarrassment and a lack of wit and grace. So men's public, ceremonious encounters seem ever more clumsy, but more tender and honorable, without being so. But will manners keep going downhill? I think, rather, that manners are going in a deep curve, and that we are nearing its low point. Now we inherit manners shaped by earlier conditions, and they are passed on and learned ever less thoroughly. But once society has become more certain of its intentions and principles, these will have a shaping effect, and there will be social manners, gestures, and expressions that must appear as necessary and simply natural as these intentions and principles are. Better division of time and labor; gymnastic exercise become the companion of every pleasant leisure hour; increased and more rigorous contemplation, which gives cleverness and suppleness even to the body-all this will come with it. As this point one might, of course, think, somewhat scornfully, of our scholars: do they, who claim to be antecedents of the new culture, distinguish themselves by superior manners? Such is not the case, though their spirit may be willing enough: their flesh is weak.9 The past is still too strong in their muscles; they still stand in an unfree position, half secular clergymen, half the dependent educators of the upper classes; in addition, the pedantry of science and out-of-date, mindless methods have made them crippled and lifeless. Thus they are, bodily at least, and often three-quarters spiritually, too, still courtiers of an old, even senile culture, and, as such, senile themselves; the new spirit, which occasionally rumbles about in these old shells, serves for the meanwhile only to make them more uncertain and anxious. They are haunted by ghosts of the past, as well as ghosts of the future; no wonder that they neither look their best, nor act in the most obliging way.

I wish I understood it,” she said. “It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.” “You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?” “There’s no self to hate. It’s like, when I look into myself, there’s no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don’t feel like they’re mine. They’re not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It’s like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there’s a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it’s solid all the way through. But with me, I don’t think there is one that’s solid. They just keep getting smaller.” “That reminds me of a story my mom tells,” Daisy said. “What story?” I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything. “So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’ “The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’ “And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’ “And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’ “And the old woman says, ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It’s turtles all the way down.’” I laughed. “It’s turtles all the way down.” “It’s turtles all the way fucking down, Holmesy. You’re trying to find the turtle at the bottom of the pile, but that’s not how it works.” “Because it’s turtles all the way down,” I said again, feeling something akin to a spiritual revelation.

There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one,” he would say, “We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find order and perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, “Ah, it was all worth it.” The Blue Monk stood up. “We will sing for you now, Edmund. It is the ocean’s wordless song of incomparable beauty. It is the song of the universe, the song of your past, the song of your future.” Edmund’s eyes were still closed when he heard the first Blue Monk sing.

Those who don’t believe in the spiritual foundations of their faith, who only pay lip service to the outer shell of their religious rituals, cannot be tolerant of others.

Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself . . . .’ ” Matthew 16:24     Individuality is the hard outer layer surrounding the inner spiritual life. Individuality shoves others aside, separating and isolating people. We see it as the primary characteristic of a child, and rightly so. When we confuse individuality with the spiritual life, we remain isolated. This shell of individuality is God’s created natural covering designed to protect the spiritual life. But our individuality must be yielded to God so that our spiritual life may be brought forth into fellowship with Him.

Our spirits live and grow in our human bodies much like the chick develops inside the egg. If it were possible for the chick to be told that a great world waits beyond its shell, that this world is filled with fruits and flowers, rivers and great mountains, and that its own mother is also there waiting for it to be set free and to experience this splendor, the chick could still neither comprehend nor believe it. Even if one explained that its feathers and wings and eyes were developing so that it could fly and see, still it would not be able to believe it, nor would any proof be possible, until it broke through its shell. In the same way, there are many people who cannot comprehend the spiritual life or the existence of God because they cannot see beyond the confines of their bodily sense. Their thoughts – like delicate wings – cannot yet carry them beyond the narrow confines of logic. Their weak eyes cannot yet make out those eternal treasures that God has prepared for his children. The only condition necessary for us to break out  of our material limitations and attain spiritual life is darshana that we accept the life-giving warmth of God’s spirit, just as the chick receives its mother’s warmth. Without that warmth, we will not take on the nature of the Spirit and we may die without ever hatching out of this material body.

To receive the universe into oneself, after the manner of some “mystics,” is simply to become inflated with the conceit that one is God and so set up yet another opposition between the mighty whole and the degraded part. To give oneself utterly and slavishly to the world is to become a spiritual nonentity, a mechanism, a shell, a leaf blown by the winds of circumstance. But if the world is received and the self given at the same time, there prevails that union which brings about the Second Birth.

Did you know the bear is one of the most spiritual animals on earth,” says a man beside them. His vaguely English words struggle to emerge through an eastern European shell. “This is due to the omega-3 fatty acids they consume.” “My mom takes those pills,” says Gaspar. “She’s always praying.

The divine meaning of the Scriptures has to be gleaned from the letter of it and beyond the letter, through contemplation guided by the Spirit. In the Fathers we do not find any fundamentalism, but Scripture opened by the Spirit to its very heart, namely the mystery of the Trinity, the source of love, and Christ's victory over death and hell, the triumph of love. If you try to reduce the divine meaning to the purely external signification of the words, the Word will have no reason to come down to you. It will return to its secret dwelling, which is contemplation that is worthy of it. For it has wings, this divine meaning, given to it by the Holy Spirit who is its guide ... But to be unwilling ever to rise above the letter, never to give up feeding on the literal sense, is the mark of a life of falsehood. Origen Commentary on Proverbs, 2.3 (PG 17, 2.2.1-4) Origen, whose Brilliant thought fertilized all Christian spirituality, especially, but not only, in the East, compares Scripture to an almond. He himself is an inspired interpreter of Scripture, and if his thought has had to be corrected on other points, it remains fully and directly nourishing in this field. The bitter rind is the letter that kills and that has to be rejected. The protecting shell is the ethical teaching, that, as a necessary part of the process of going into greater depth, requires a course of careful purification. Then the spiritual kernel is reached, which is all that matters, which feeds the soul on the mysteries of divine wisdom.

Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness. Not only your psychological form but also your physical form — your body — becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause — the resistance pattern — has not been dissolved.

Paul declares the “invisible things of him from the creation of the world” can help us understand “his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20). The truth that God is a “tri-unity” of two invisible persons (Father and Spirit) and one visible person (Jesus) is evident even in creation. The universe is composed of three structures: space, matter, and time. Of these three, only matter is visible. Space requires length, height, and width to constitute space. Each dimension is separate and distinct in itself, yet the three form space—if you remove height, you no longer have space. Time is also a tri-unity of past, present, and future. Two are invisible (past and future), and one visible (present). Each is separate and distinct, as well as essential for time to exist. Man is also a “tri-unity,” having physical, mental, and spiritual components. Again, two are invisible (mental and spiritual) and one visible (physical). Cells compose the fundamental structural unit of all living organisms. All organic life is made up from cells that consist of three primary parts: the outer wall, the cytoplasm, and the nucleus (like the shell, white, and yoke of an egg). If any one is removed, the cell dies. In each of these examples, the removal of any one component results in the demise of the whole. In like manner, the Godhead contains three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each is God (Ephesians 4:6; Titus 2:13; Acts 5:3, 4), yet there is one God. The removal of one person destroys the unity of the whole. Even the gospel story illustrates the interdependency of threes. The sanctuary had three places: the Courtyard, the Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place. There are three stages of salvation: justification, sanctification, and glorification. In Isaiah 6:3, the angels around God’s throne cry “Holy, Holy, Holy” three times—once for the Father, once for the Son, and once for the Holy Spirit.

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.

… the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego—your need to possess and control—and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous— large souled. —Sam Keen, philosopher

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find “the pearl of great price” that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

The Qur’an does not just lead us, it liberates us from the grips of the ego. It does not just guide us; it helps us grow past the shells of our limiting beliefs. It does not just confront us; it consoles us with God’s infinite mercy. It reminds us of our holy purpose, of how incredibly valuable we are in the eyes of God, and inspires us to live a life not simply based on our present limited capacity, but to trust that when we depend on God all things are possible by virtue of His infinite and all-encompassing power. The Qur’an is not meant to only be recited, it is meant to be taken in like the fragrance of a rose, deep within our essence, allowing it to permeate in the deepest recesses of our being. The Qur’an was sent as a pathway of return to God. As the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) said, “This Qur’an is the rope of Allah, and it is the clear light and healing. It is a protection for the one who clings to it and a rescue for the one who follows it. It is not crooked and so it puts things straight.

There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward and spiritual grace;

There seems to be a thin, resilient, and self-healing shell between one's spiritual awareness and that dense web of confusion and often distress that is life in the world of humans. You might poke through now and then, only to find it closing up immediately behind you again. Leaving you wondering if you had really just seen that. Or had it only been your imagination? - Edward Fahey

I believe in the reincarnation of the imagination. Many thousands of years ago, a dreamer lay in a field at night. He reached out to touch the moon, and it was beyond his reach. But, it was not beyond the reach of his imagination. Throughout millennia, his imagination, immortal, reincarnate, strove ever to extend his reach, until his ambition was realized. Although thousands of years were torn from the pages of the dreamer’s calendar, they are but a heartbeat of the spacetime where imagination dwells. This belief in the reincarnation of imagination is fundamental to an optimism that all things humanly imaginable are humanly possible. This optimism drives ambition and struggle; it fuels the energy and the hope that defy surrender or capitulation; and it sustains the belief that a good cause will be realized just as it is imagined, by the first voice of its incarnation through all of its many reincarnations, all within but the beat of the continuum of human existence. Such optimism is not the naïveté of innocence nor the delusion of inexperience untested by harsh reality. It confronts the troubles and the difficulties of the oftentimes cold, inhospitable and spiritually challenging, natural world. Indeed, for man to finally reach the moon, the reality of the coldest, most barren darkness had to be overcome against chains of gravity heavily weighing upon an infinite imagination’s liberation from a finite shell. Of this, I tell my children, that they may believe that their dreams and ambitions are attainable. That they dare not quit the struggle; that each effort only furthers the cause. That time is not a barrier, but a merely a condition; it is as much a part of the landscape in the spacetime of their existence as are the up and the down, or the near and the far. “When” will happen with “how,” and how is a continuous momentum as long as the dream is maintained and the imagination strives. And I tell them that, just as there was a dreamer reaching for the moon, there once was a dreamer who imagined extending his arms to enfold the world in peace. His imaginings have been reincarnated throughout millennia. We are urged and we urge others to imagine likewise, and thereby to keep this dream alive. And we shall discover the how, and we shall achieve the when, as long as we continue this dream along the path that has been imagined for us. This is what I believe. I share it with you. Invigorate it. Sustain it, that it may come to pass.

Yes. Essentially he told me his race felt very sorry for the human beings for basically two reasons. The first is that all humans have the same potential and abilities to perform the very same things his race could do. Those things we find so marvelous and magical but humans did not know how to do them. For example he told me in cases where there is injury or disease of the body, it would not be necessary to confine one of his species to a special treatment facility such as the one he was confined in at the moment. He told me they either individually or joined together could produce all the healing necessary to repair their bodies. The second reason they felt sorry for us was we did not seem to realize we were spiritual beings only living in a temporary shell and we were totally disconnected from our spiritual self. Dr. L: That is a fascinating piece of information. Can you tell us anything further that you learned?

What if hell is full of grammar, and heaven has no form? Therefore a grimoire is grammar; a book of spells in Hell, which produces empty shells... Heaven has no factor, thus doesn't need a protractor; as on every degree, 0neness can see.

No belief is true, life has no meaning, nothing we do matters. All is vanity and a striving after wind. We’re going to die and it will be as if we never lived. Everything we think is true is false, all our beliefs are delusions and everything we know is a lie. There is no such thing as success, nothing we do can make any possible difference, no matter how fast we go or how far ahead we are, we are not going anywhere. The best and the brightest are in a dead-tie with the worst and the dimmest. These are the facts of life, simple, obvious, plain to behold, yet universally unrecognized and unacknowledged. This is what it means to see what’s not and not see what is, to be in denial, to be asleep within the dream, to reside in the womb of the unborn. We are madly, desperately, insanely afraid of the truth, and it is that fear that walls us off from our unbounded nature. It is the emotional energy of fear that erects and maintains the egoic shell.

What this means is that the highest goal of spiritual immortality can only be reached through the living vehicle of the human body and its powerful vitality. But once the adept has arrived at this goal, he may only realize the ultimate truth by abandoning the body for his spiritual 'flight into space'. A good analogy here is a chicken embryo growing inside its eggshell. If the shell breaks before incubation is complete, there is no life; similarly, if an adept's body 'breaks' and dies before he has completed 'incubation' of his spirit-body, he loses his chance of spiritual immortality after death. When the inner embryo in a chicken egg is fully developed, however, it must crack open the shell and discard it in order to live. Similarly, once the adept has fully developed his spirit-body, he must abandon the flesh sooner or later in order to let his spirit roam freely in the cosmos. This exit occurs through an actual crack that develops in the suture on the crown of the skull in such adepts. Only newborn babies and the most advanced adepts have such loose sutures in their skulls. p393

Anderson’s use of the word ‘grotesque’ is quite important in this context. In its usual sense in reference to human beings it connotes disgust or revulsion, but Anderson’s use is quite different. To him a grotesque is, as he points out later, like the twisted apples that are left behind in the orchards because they are imperfect. These apples, he says, are the sweetest of all, perhaps even because of the imperfections that have caused them to be rejected. He approaches the people in his stories as he does the apples, secure in his knowledge that the sources or natures of their deformities are unimportant when compared to their intrinsic worth as human beings needing and deserving of understanding. This approach is based on intuition rather than objective knowledge, and it is the same sort of intuition with which one approaches the twisted apples; he believes that one dare not reject because of mere appearance, either physical or spiritual; that appearance may mask a significant experience made more intense and more worthwhile by the deformity itself. In the body of the work proper, following this introductory sketch, Anderson has set up an organizational pattern that no only gives partial unity to the book but explores systematically the diverse origins of the isolation of his people, each of whom is in effect a social displaced person because he is cut off from human intercourse with his fellow human beings. In the first three stories Anderson deals with three aspects of the problem of human isolation. The first story, ‘Hands,’ deals with the inability to communicate feeling; the second, ‘Paper Pills,’ is devoted to the inability to communicate thought; and the third, ‘Mother,’ focuses on the inability to communicate love. This three-phased examination of the basic problem of human isolation sets the tone for the rest of the book because these three shortcomings, resulting partially from the narrowness of the vision of each central figure but primarily from the lack of sympathy with which the contemporaries of each regard him, are the real creators of the grotesques in human nature. Each of the three characters has encountered one aspect of the problem: he has something that he feels is vital and real within himself that he wants desperately to reveal to others, but in each case he is rebuffed, and, turning in upon himself, he becomes a bit more twisted and worn spiritually. But, like the apples left in the orchards, he is the sweeter, the more human for it. In each case the inner vision of the main character remains clear, and the thing that he wishes to communicate is in itself good, but his inability to break through the shell that prevents him from talking to others results in misunderstanding and spiritual tragedy. David D. Anderson “Sherwood Anderson’s Moments of Insight

The underlying cause of all shame is the deep and unshakable suspicion that I am an imposter. I sense the absence of true-self in myself, but not in others, so I naturally assume others to be real people and myself to be false. Seeing the outer shells everyone else has so convincingly erected and not knowing them to be hollow, I necessarily feel singularly fraudulent and, of course, shameful. (Spiritual Enlightenment, p. 242)

the result of denying and minimizing our wounds over many years is that we become less and less human, empty Christian shells with painted smiley faces.

Spiritual foolishness is the willful acceptance of those situations, circumstances, people and strongholds that contradict the Word of God.

Oftentimes, we think we are in control of our lives and journey. Suddenly, we experience the unexpected and we think we are being chastised but instead we are being awakened to see that we were never in control of our lives. We were only walking on grounds that make us comfortable. Without the right thought process, we may choices that lead to consequences which may bring us pain, awaken ego and fear and make us more vain. Reality is that until you find your true self, connect with your spirit and soul (remember you are a spiritual being before the physical/flesh), you will be breaking the shells of your fragile heart, inflicting pain on others and drawing yourself away from the light and truth that you are. The moment you make the decision to find yourself, your life will forever be changed and you will see life in the true meaning of which God created it to be. Your perspective will forever be changed and you will never be the same again

Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope. Now there is a distinction to be made between true lament and the more sinister form of sadness we know as despair. Despair is lament emptied of hope. It is a shell that invites the whole of your soul to dwell in its void. Many of us will visit this shell, but despair depends upon our staying. With no framework for healthy lament, I was a prisoner to sadness. Even still, it's not good to drag someone from their lament out of fear of despair. In fact, being forced too quickly out of lament can drag the soul into despair in secret. We are left to wander in sadness but without a confidant to help guide us out of the void.

First, we must be convinced in our minds that the doctrine of the Sabbath is God’s revealed truth. Second, we must exercise personal self-discipline and say no to other things so we can say yes to seeking God on the Sabbath. Third, in order that our Sabbath-keeping not become a hollow shell or proud legalism, God calls us to make the Sabbath a day of spiritual delight. Fourth, the best Sabbath on earth is only a foretaste of the feast of heaven, and that must be our ultimate hope and desire.

faith and belief are the practices of committing a life in the face of no answers. God is and always will be outside of human comprehension. And loving Her is an act; it’s not stubbornly repeating creeds and trying to force Her into modern expectations or rational paradigms. She’ll never fit in the same boxes we apply to science and reason; She’s not meant to. And to try to force it only breeds spiritual violence in the end.

Kindness is the pearl of a heart, without it the heart is just an empty shell.

I am the soul…but is that true?’ she asked herself aloud. ‘What am I actually? I am not the soul, I am beyond the soul and yet I am nothing. I am an empty shell of living cells, where an essence that I’ve learned to recognise as me inhabits.

Thelema is a statement of the spiritual facts of life; it does not give a set of arbitrary rules or conditions that are supposed to be “lived up to”. The natural soul or prima materia must therefore be torn apart or dissembled by the wheels set in motion by the 93 current. Dying the “self slain” death of an Initiate she returns that which sprang from the source of Nuit. Only then is she able to break open the shell of her separate existence. The

For the natural selectivity of the island I will have to substitute a conscious selectivity based on another sense of values - a sense of values I have become more aware of here. Island precepts, I might call them if I could define them, signposts toward another way of living. Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Balance of physical, intellectual and spiritual life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittent of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells." (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea, pg 112)

Empirical logic achieved a signal triumph in the Old Testament, where survivals from the early proto-logical stage are very few and far between. With it man reached a point where his best judgments about his relation to God, his fellow men and the world, were in most respects not appreciably inferior to ours. In fundamental ethical and spiritual matters we have not progressed at all beyond the empirico-logical world of the Old Testament or the unrivalled fusion of proto-logical intuition, 64 [see Coomaraswamy, Review of Religion, 1942, p. 138, paragraph 3] empirico-logical wisdom and logical deduction which we find in the New Testament. In fact a very large section of modern religion, literature and art actually represents a pronounced retrogression when compared with the Old Testament. For example, astrology, spiritism and kindred divagations, which have become religion to tens of millions of Europeans and Americans, are only the outgrowth of proto-logical interpretation of nature, fed by empirico-logical data and covered with a spurious shell of Aristotelian logic and scientific induction. Plastic and graphic art has swung violently away from logical perspective and perceptual accuracy, and has plunged into primordial depths of conceptual drawing and intuitive imagery. While it cannot be denied that this swing from classical art to conceptual and impressionistic art has yielded some valuable results, it is also true that it represents a very extreme retrogression into the proto-logical past. Much of the poetry, drama and fiction which has been written during the past half-century is also a reversion from classical and logical standards of morality and beauty into primitive savagery or pathological abnormality. Some of it has reached such paralogical levels of sophistication that it has lost all power to furnish any standards at all to a generation which has deliberately tried to abandon its entire heritage from the past. All systematic attempts to discredit inherited sexual morality, to substitute dream-states for reflection, and to replace logical writing by jargon, are retreats into the jungle from which man emerged through long and painful millennia of disillusionment. With the same brains and affective reactions as those which our ancestors possessed two thousand years ago, increasing sophistication has not been able to teach us any sounder fundamental principles of life than were known at that time. . . . Unless we can continue along the pathway of personal morality and spiritual growth which was marked out for civilized man by the founders of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, more than two thousand years ago, our superior skill in modifying and even in transforming the material world about us can lead only to repeated disasters, each more terrible than its predecessor. (Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 5th Ed. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 31-33.)

There is a somatic part of your soul, what I refer to as the outer shell and there is a metaphysical part of your soul, what I refer to as the inner core. If you are interested in spiritual gnosis you will likely pay attention on your physical body, if you are mainly focused on absolute transcendence you remain relatively detached from your bodily concerns. The first emphasizes on the dynamics of the fallen realm, the second emphasizes the attention on the eternal realm, simple as that and some people combine a little of both.

Become clear on what you want: Set a timer for 30 minutes. Make a list of 50 goals you have for your life: long-term goals, short-term goals, personal goals, family goals, health goals, spiritual goals, business/career goals, financial goals, social goals, hobby goals, and everything in between.

Likewise, God allows no shell to cover the marvelous bronze of his Son’s nature in his people. It may have the right shape but not the right substance. After the various stages of spiritual growth, the final breaking is often the most bewildering. Why? Because having already passed through so much suffering, you wonder why more painful breaking is necessary, especially since you already bear a great resemblance to Christ. But, without the outer shell broken, people will only see the likeness of Christ, not the person of Christ in you.

The skylark knows that the Moon is not just a satellite; the drop of Arcturus knows which shell has the capacity to turn it to a pearl; river knows the path to reach the ocean and the morning star knows in which direction it has to glow. In a similar encounter, I know YOU as you have been a part of me since the process of evolution, a part without which 'existence' would not have existed.

Heart of Humility: poem excerpt In a world full of brashness, pretence and bravado, Humility is undoubtedly a rare, And wonderful gift.

Beautifully Human We are all beautifully human. Sometimes we break, Sometimes we get angry, Sometimes we lose hope, But most importantly, We are still beautifully human. Vulnerable. Unique. Enduring. We are no less a person for our hurt.

Soar And how can you soar When you are so rooted to your pain? The lessons of letting go, my love, are never made in vain. Take what you need so you can navigate your way, And let the rest go, with love and with faith.