We Must Work On Our Souls, Enlarging

Compassion Is Not Pity ... Compassion Never Considers An Object As Weak Or Inferior. Compassion, One Might Say, Works From A Strength Born Of Awareness Of Shared Weakness, And Not From Someone Else's Weakness. And From The Awareness Of The Mutuality Of Us All. Thus To Put Down Another As In Pity Is To Put Down Oneself.

I'll Put It To You This Way: I Never, Ever Think About The Things That I Get Involved With On A Macro Means-to-an-ends Scale.

Healthy Mysticism Praises Acts Of Letting Go, Of Being Emptied, Of Getting In Touch With The Space Inside And Expanding This Until It Merges With The Space Outside. Space Meeting Space; Empty Pouring Into Empty. Births Happen From That Encounter With Emptiness, Nothingness. . . . Let Us Not Fight Emptiness And Nothingness, But Allow It To Penetrate Us Even As We Penetrate It.

A Civilization Built On Dualism And War Within And Between Persons, One That Puts Its Most Creative Minds And Its Best Engineers To Sadistic Work Building More And More Destructive Weapons, Is No Civilization At All. It Needs A Radical Transformation From The Heart Outwards. It Needs To Outgrow And Outlaw War Just As In The Last Century It Outlawed Slavery. The Human Race Has Outgrown War, But It Hardly Knows It Yet.

Facing The Darkness, Admitting The Pain, Allowing The Pain To Be Pain, Is Never Easy. This Is Why Courage - Big-heartedness - Is The Most Essential Virtue On The Spiritual Journey. But If We Fail To Let Pain Be Pain - And Our Entire Patriarchal Culture Refuses To Let This Happen - Then Pain Will Haunt Us In Nightmarish Ways. We Will Become Pain's Victims Instead Of The Healers We Might Become.