“We can remove the veil that shrouds our understanding and made us forget who we truly are. When we understand the core self and live from the core self, the myth of separation, concepts of separation, color, religion, class, intelligence…all these fade away. We are not our color. We are not our religion. We are not our sexual preference. We are human beings. We are spiritual beings.”

“As free human beings we can use our unique intelligence to try to understand ourselves and our world. But if we are prevented from using our creative potential, we are deprived of one of the basic characteristics of a human being.”

“Strive to engage in activities that require constant self-development. Nurture and develop the physical body, but also our spiritual nature. We exist for a purpose: to honor our spirituality. When we do, we cannot help but love others. Hurting others is easily recognized as a crime against ourselves. It’s no coincidence that all religions teach this at their core.”

“We are not ‘everything,’ but neither are we ‘nothing.’ Spirituality is discovered in that space between paradox’s extremes, for there we confront our helplessness and powerlessness, our woundedness. In seeking to understand our limitations, we seek not only an easing of our pain but an understanding of what it means to hurt and what it means to be healed. Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to ‘blame’ for our errors — neither ourselves nor anyone nor anything else. Spirituality helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the very core of our human be-ing.”

“Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think - all these things - twenty-four hours a day. One's religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call "religion." It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, and are, is our religion.”

“Deep in ourselves resides the religious impulse. Out of the passions of our clay it rises.We have religion when we stop deluding ourselves that we are self-sufficient, self-sustaining or self-derived.We have religion when we hold some hope beyond the present, some self-respect beyond our failures.We have religion when our hearts are capable of leaping up at beauty,when our nerves are edged by some dream in our heart.We have religion when we have an abiding gratitude for all that we have received.We have religion when we look upon people with all their failings and still find in them good; when we look beyond people to the grandeur in nature and to the purpose in our own heart.We have religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that islarger than ourselves.”