“Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standard of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world.”
“Our gods, if we choose to believe in them, must be forced to live up to ethics that far surpass our own human standards. If they fall short of the ethical conditions we place upon ourselves, what use are they to us - except to rationalize our own failures?”
“This spiritual and creative journey is about this dance of self, a self that must find its unique voice and then bring this voice back to the world. Spiritually it is about living our principles with those who share this type of path and with those who don’t. It’s living life from within, using the six perfections or our principles as guiding posts, as pointers but never absolutes. In our creative and spiritual life there are no absolutes because we are discovering ourselves, and our surroundings in a constantly changing world.”
“Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”
“We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.”
“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.”