Great Throughts Treasury

"A dream ignored is like a letter unopened."

"A haimish group?a warm group of Jewish homies."

"According to the Buddhist tradition, he began, there is no sort of conversion or missionary work. It is not good to ask someone to follow a different faith. Yet, because there are so many different mental dispositions, one religion simply cannot serve, cannot satisfy all people."

"Dreams are at the foundation of all religions."

"Historically, the rabbis are split on the question of dreams. None of them denied their power."

"Direct religious experience is threatening to organized religion, which often mediates it with a rabbi or priest."

"Freud "interpreted" dreams by treating them as intellectual riddles whose details, once processed through free association, exposed hidden wishes."

"I'm too intellectual. I don't think that the theological vocabulary is as important as the experience."

"In our society, to be obsessed with a vision about how to make a better automobile makes you a genius, but to be obsessed with a vision about the nature of reality makes you a nut."

"Mainstream rabbis essentially closed the book on dreams by the sixth century, and Church fathers established that only certain saints have the discernment to determine which dreams are from God. The dream is exiled."

"So, Art [Green] said, it's hard to do Judaism and travel light. Judaism is not mostly about letting go, but mostly about attachment to God, through attachment to tradition, attachment to forms."

"The preservation of Buddhism is preserving your own internal heart. If Tibetans became terrorists they might win back Tibet, but Buddhism would be destroyed by that attitude."

"Our ancient sources of wisdom call on human beings to rise to their highest capacity and behave in extraordinarily open and generous ways to one another, under difficult circumstances to transcend differences and create understanding across all barriers of convention and fear. This wisdom is fragile as our environment is fragile, threatened by an overwhelming material culture. I believe in a spiritual ecology. In today?s world, Judaism and Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions are endangered species."

"The ancient sages said, ?He who is angry?it is the same as if he worshiped idols.? They also said, ?One who yields to anger?if he is a sage, his wisdom departs from him; if he is a prophet, his prophetic gift departs from him.? Those of an irate disposition?their life is not worth living."

"We can?t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones ? but we can choose how to come to terms with them."

"Your dreams change. Initially the belly-buttons help establish the dreamer's predicament - the situation you are trapped in or held back by."