Great Throughts Treasury

"What would I do if you never came here?' But I was ALWAYS coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."

"What worked yesterday doesn't always work today."

"When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings."

"Whatever this feeling is- this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to."

"When Catherine told me about this (tragedy nearby), I could only say, shocked, Dear God, that family needs grace. She replied firmly, That family needs casseroles, and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this _is_ grace."

"When the dust has settled years later, we might ask ourselves, What was I thinking? and the answer is usually: You weren’t. Psychologists call that state of deluded madness narcissistic love. I call it my twenties."

"When the past has passed from you at last, let go. Then climb down and begin the rest of your life. With great joy."

"When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?"

"When I sit in my silence and look at my mind, it is only questions of longing and control that emerge to agitate me, and this agitation is what keeps me from evolving forward."

"When you are walking down the road in Bali and your pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, Where are you going? The second question is, Where are you coming from? To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better."

"When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It's safe. Let go."

"When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become log-jammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once."

"When you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt-this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight."

"When you set out in the world to help yourself, sometimes you end up helping Tutti."

"When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore."

"Whenever I get lonely these days I think: So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings."

"Where am I getting the brain space to store these words? I'm hoping that maybe my mind has decided to clear out some old negative thoughts and sad memories and replace them with these shiny new words."

"Whenever I would feel such happiness my guilt alarm went off."

"Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can call the good energy with a smile."

"Women’s sense of integrity seems to be entwined with an ethic of care, so that to see themselves as women as to see themselves in a relationship of connection…I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein that have quietly buried in many neat rows– the personal dreams they have given up for their families…(Women) have a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. The cold ugly fact is that marriage does not benefit women as much as it benefits men. From studies, married men perform dazzingly better in life, live longer, accumulate more, excel at careers, report to be happier, less likely to die from a violent death, suffer less from alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression than single man…The reverse is not true. In fact, every fact is reverse, single women fare much better than married women. On average, married women take a 7% pay cut. All of this adds up to what Sociologists called the Marriage Benefit Imbalance…It is important to pause here and inspect why so women long for it (marriage) so deeply."

"Where did you get the idea you aren't allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You're a constituent--you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So, put your opinion out there. Make your case. Believe me--it will at least be taken into consideration."

"Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old."

"With each reunion (we) had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me?"

"Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue."

"You are not only what you think about it. The feelings are a slave to your thoughts, and you're a slave to your emotions."

"Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever."

"You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words."

"You don't like it? asked Luca, who loves this stuff."

"You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone outta be."

"You have been to hell, Ketut? He smiled. Of course he's been there. What's it like in hell? Same like in heaven, he said. He saw my confusion and tried to explain. Universe is a circle, Liss. He said. To up, to down -- all same, at end. I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell? Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss. He laughed. Same-same, he said. Same in end, so better to be happy in journey. I said, So, if heaven is love, then hell is.. Love, too, he said. Ketut laughed again, Always so difficult for young people to understand this!"

"You have no idea how strong my love is!"

"You know, it's a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn't happen to speak is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we're about to jump."

"You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings."

"You have now reached infatuation’s final destination—the complete and merciless devaluation of self."

"You have the opposite of poker face. You have like... miniature golf face."

"You know how it looks like people like dogs, I think you look like your men!!"

"You learn to smile even in you liver?' 'Even in my lire, Ketut. Big smile in my liver."

"You love new boyfriend? I think so. Yes. Then you must spoil him. And he must spoil you."

"You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself."

"You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here"

"You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs, instead of two...But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look thorough your heart, instead"

"You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place."

"You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control."

"You take away whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light."

"Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."

"You must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God."

"Your father only has one foot on this earth. And really, really long legs."

"You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice, staying strong, instead."

"Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite. But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion."

"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that's holding you back, the person who brings you to your attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave."