As Catholic mystic Thomas Merton observed, "Everything that is, is holy." To see the truth of this statement is the beginning of an abundant life.

Do not fight your inner demons. Learn to absorb them into your being with compassion - for they are part of you! Remember what Jesus says: love your enemies. To love means to respect, to attend to, to be ready to respond to, and to understand.

Real renunciation is not self-deprivation or asceticism. If it were, many masochists would qualify as spiritual people. True spirituality is an affirmation of life and not a negation of it. The main point is to have equal love for all.

[A]ll beings in the universe are interdependent. Thus, the love of God means the love of All There Is. The one who loves God is the one who adopts a loving attitude to all things in life, for all are intimately connected and do not exist apart from one another. Therefore, the second greatest commandment is simply a derivative of the first one. Our love for others is due to our recognition that each one of them is also an integral part of God, inseparable from Ultimate Reality.

Compassion is not a matter of charity, pity, or sympathy. It is a result of seeing the interconnectedness of all things and recognizing that this is a participatory universe in which we are all one.

We cannot arrive at the original "I" through rational thought! The Self has to remain forever fuzzy. Indeed, it is the Subject that cannot be observed, the Name that cannot be named, the Word than cannot be spoken, It is the Silence that cannot be comprehended by the rational mind.

For no matter what our religion, culture, or belief is, we always have a common reference point: the Self, who is the ultimate observer. The Self is the Way!

The presence of multiple interpretations is never a problem; it is simply a manifestation of the diversity of life. It is only when we try to enforce uniformity in interpretation that acts of violence, human suffering, and the deadening of the soul begin.

For most people, truth is closely associated with with solidity, finality, permanence, universality, and security. But Jesus used the metaphor of "living water" for truth. [...] While we tend to visualize truth as some kind of sacred rock, Jesus visualized it as water: amorphous, adaptable, and incapable of being grasped.