Great Throughts Treasury

"When you take a stand, it shapes who you are. It sets your priorities. It wakes you up in the morning, and it dresses you. It puts you to bed at night. There's deep spirituality in that way of being."

"Many social justice or social activist movements have been rooted in a position. A position is usually against something. Any position will call up its opposition. If I say up, it generates down. If I say right, it really creates left. If I say good, it creates bad. So a position creates its opposition. A stand is something quite distinct from that."

"There are synonyms for “stand” such as “declaration” or “commitment,” but let me talk for just a few moments about the power of a stand. A stand comes from the heart, from the soul. A stand is always life affirming. A stand is always trustworthy. A stand is natural to who you are. When we use the phrase “take a stand” I’m really inviting you to un-cover, or “unconceal,” or recognize, or affirm, or claim the stand that you already are. "

"A new alloy consciousness will emerge that honors the Eagle people for the remarkable accomplishments of the mind, and honors the Condor people for the deep wisdom of the heart- and only together the crisis will be resolved and a sustainable future will emerge for all."

"I suggest that sufficiency is precise. Enough is a place you can arrive at and dwell in. So often we think of "abundance'" as the point at which we'll know we've really arrived, but abundance continues to be elusive if we think we'll find it in some excessive amount of something. True abundance does exist; it flows from sufficiency, in an experience of the beauty and wholeness of what is. Abundance is a fact of nature. It is a fundamental law of nature, that there is enough and it is finite. Its finiteness is no threat; it creates a more accurate relationship that commands respect, reverence, and managing those resources with the knowledge that they are precious and in ways that do the most good for the most people."

"Greed and fear of scarcity are programmed; they do not exist in nature, not even in human nature. They are built into the money system in which we swim.? And ?Adam Smith?s system of economics could more accurately be described as the allocation of scarce resources through the process of individual greed.I suggest that if you are willing to let go, let go of the chase to acquire or accumulate always more and let go of that way of perceiving the world, then you can take all that energy and attention and invest it in what you have. When you do that you will find unimagined treasures, and wealth of surprising and even stunning depth and diversity."

"It could be said that a great fund-raiser is a broker for the sacred energy of money, helping people use the money that flows through their lives in the most useful way that is consistent with their aspirations and hopes for humanity."

"For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is I didn?t get enough sleep. The next one is I don't have enough time. Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life"

"Money itself isn?t the issue. It is neutral. It?s the power we give it that gets our of control."

"Our relationship with money is based in an unexamined and unquestioned set of assumptions that are lies."

"Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency for love? Money flows through all our lives, sometimes like a gushing river, and sometimes like a trickle?.It can carry guilt, shame and regret or rich blessings?When it is flowing, it can purify, cleanse, create growth, and nourish. But when it is blocked or held too long, it can grow stagnant and toxic to those withholding it or hoarding it?.Stop the flow of money toward those people and products that demean life."

"In the context of sufficiency, philanthropy and service become an expression of interconnectedness"

"Now tell me ? is ?money a conduit, a way to express your highest ideals?, a ?currency of love a commitment, expressing the best of who you are? or is it ?a currency of consumption driven by emptiness and lack and the allure of external messages? in your life? What do you want it to be?"

"There is no recognition of the trap that wealth so often is, and of the suffering of the wealthy: the loneliness, the isolation, the hardening of the heart, the hunger and the poverty of the soul can come with the burden of wealth."

"Our struggle around money, and all the tension, fears, and excesses that go with it, has a parallel in nature. Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris says that the caterpillar, at a certain point in its life cycle, becomes a voracious, over consumptive glutton consuming everything in sight and within reach. At this point in its evolution it can eat hundreds of times its own weight, and the more it consumes the more fat and sluggish it gets. At that same moment of developmental excess, inside the caterpillar the imaginal cells begin to stir. Imaginal cells are specialized cells, and in the minority, but when they connect with each other they become the genetic directors of the metamorphosis of the caterpillar. At some point in the caterpillar?s feeding, frenzy stage, the imaginal cells usher in the process in which the over-consumptive caterpillar becomes the nutritive soup out of which the imaginal cells create the miracle of the butterfly."

"When you let go of trying to get more of what you don't really need, it frees up oceans of energy to make a difference with what you have."