Study water. Try to grab a hold of water, and it will always elude you. You just have to let yourself be in it. It's soft, and it overcomes anything that's hard. Put the hardest substance - say, titanium - out there, and let water flow over it. Eventually, patiently, peacefully, the water will just wear it away. Also, water will enter anywhere - through any opening at all. So, let yourself be like that. God is in nature, everywhere and always. And we have so much to learn.
We can sit here and talk about all the negativity, which we've done a little bit, but for every act of evil in the world, there are a million acts of kindness. Basically, our nature is to love each other and care about each other, and most of us do that. Most of us have no quarrel with anybody who's living on another side of the planet and who might have a different religious persuasion. It's just these small minorities to the far right and the far left who get all of the news time and print space.
We're starting to look at a new way of being, and I know ultimately that it will triumph. I think it's coming soon, too.
What I'm most excited about is that there's an openness to a shift, and I do think that there's a shift happening.
What we are doing is deeply unfair and a profound tragedy - what we're doing in the way of global warming, what we're doing to the oceans - and none of it makes any sense to me.
It's slow. It's inch by inch. But nature always bats last. The planet isn't going anywhere.
We make weapons now that, if we ever used them, would kill ourselves. How do you explode a weapon with so much radiation in it that it will wipe out an entire city and think that it's not going to blow over your own cities? We all breathe the same air. It's madness.
Why do we even make guns? I'm not against gun control. I'm against guns, period. I'm against anything at all that is used as an instrument of death. Why would we manufacture such a thing? Why would we have a business that does it? Why don't we figure out a way to disarm ourselves totally?
Thousands of children are killed by handguns in the United States each year. What is that about? What are we doing? We accept that? And we accept the presence of these weapons that are in silos and on submarines and airplanes? If any madman gets hold of them - and certainly there are madmen out there who will figure out how to get hold of them, they always have - what are we even making such things for?
If I sat down in any room, I'd have as much to learn from anybody in that room as they'd have to learn from me. If I sit down and just really listen and hear who you are and what you have to say, what you fears are, what your ambitions are, and what your vision is, I have just as much to learn from you as you have to learn from me.
We're doing terribly. We're leaving these unborn children trillions of dollars of debt, which is just horrific. We're leaving nuclear weapons - enough to end life as we know it - all over the planet. We're leaving a legacy of violence and killing and guns.
Like a lot of us, sometimes I'm preaching to the choir, and sometimes my voice doesn't even get heard at all. Sometimes I think that what I'm writing now might not even have an impact for the next three or four generations. Sometimes I sit there and write, and I think, "It'll be two hundred years before they get what I'm writing about."
I just go where I'm sent and I do what I'm told. I listen to the highest voices within me. I don't feel the least bit courageous. I don't feel like I deserve any medals. I don't feel that I'm any more special than anybody else who's out there.
Woodrow Wilson was the president of the United States in 1920, and he was made a fool of - his wife almost divorced him - because he wouldn't support women's suffrage. He was president during World War I, but I look back upon him as a coward. Because he knew the right thing to do - the right of women to vote was an idea whose time had come a long time before then, when a lot of women were put into prison or persecuted because they fought for it.
Forget the laws. If the laws don't make sense, if they run contrary to your conscience, you have to disobey them.
Victor Hugo said you can stop an invasion of armies, but you can never stop an invasion of ideas. There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. It wasn't until 1920, four years after my mother was born - and she's still alive and healthy - that women were given the right to vote. Now it's hard even to imagine that for the greater part of the history of our country fifty percent of the population was not allowed to vote.
Why wouldn't somebody have the same legal rights as everybody else in our society? What is that about? I don't even understand them putting same sex marriage on the ballot. So if fifty-one percent of the people say it shouldn't happen, it's not going to happen? You can get fifty-one percent of the people to say just about anything - to say let's bring back slavery, or all Mexicans should be slaves, or something absolutely crazy like that. Does that mean we do it?
When I was a kid at 16, sneaking into a burlesque theater in downtown Detroit was a big thrill. Today, in every hotel room in America, you can turn on the television and see hardcore pornography. So the shifts can go both ways, and it's incumbent on us as leaders of the spiritual community to get as many people as possible to really begin to think in God-realized ways.
There's a part of you that you can get a hold of, and there's a part of you that you can never get a hold of, and those are opposite things. Who are you? Which one are you? You are combinations of opposites.
When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?
The only thing you can do with your life is give it away. The best, happiest moments in your life are always when you're giving something away.
People need to know that they are God. We mostly do not recognize that. We've lost the sense of our own divinity.
All excuses are nothing more than misalignments with God. Just imagine the great creative Source needing an excuse. It doesn't have any concept of, "I'm too busy. I'm too old. I'm too afraid. Things are going to take too long." Source doesn't work like that. The Tao does nothing, Lao-tzu writes, but it leaves nothing undone.
I think the most common meme is that it's too difficult to change. It's too risky to change. My nature doesn't allow me to change.
If there's a distinction between men and women, I don't pay attention to it. Honestly, I don't see it. I think all of us are part feminine and part masculine.
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