This Week’s Quotation:

I know from working with people at depth for many years that most people are almost deathly afraid of their own feelings. They are often plagued, almost incessantly, by their own negative self-talk—their biting criticism of themselves and other people. They often feel unsure of who or what God is, or how to live their spirituality in the world. And I have observed so many people, including so many in the generation who are now in their twenties and thirties, who feel utterly betrayed by religion and by spirituality of any kind.

I’ve seen the darkness of that betrayal destroy the prospect of joy and fulfillment. So the most elemental factors of what it is to be a human being so often remain a mystery for people.

Becoming a Sun pp. 216-217

To Know Our Primal Reality

This is one of the more incisive passages from my book. It appears in the chapter entitled The Rays of Enlightened Thought.

It’s not that I am against religion and spiritual teaching. I offer courses in spirituality myself. It’s just that the teaching and practice of organized religion sometimes impose limiting beliefs on its followers. And then fails to lead them back to the truth of their existence. Often more contemporary spiritual teaching doesn’t have any more success.

And so, without a practical spirituality that leads a person to embrace the truth of who they are and the truth of their existence, they give up on their desire to know something more of their own primal reality and settle for the shallows of life as they have known it, afraid of their own shadow.

The truth is that you and I are not a belief. Life isn’t what anyone says it is. It is what it is.

So to know primal reality, we can’t stand beside it, looking for it. We have to accept it on its own terms and thereby become it—know ourselves as that.

Isn’t it humorous that we know what is real when we stop looking for it? And the same is true of all the desirable qualities of reality. We know love when we stop looking for it. We know who we are when we stop trying to become something we imagine we should be. We experience the reality of God when we stop looking past our own immediate experience to find it.

What does it mean to become a sun?

Every human being is already a sun on the inside—a being of intense love and light. The difference is that some people have the vision and courage to become a sun on the outside. This difference is our human destiny.