We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.

The God-image, the self-image, and the world-image are deeply connected. Normally, when one of them changes, the other two have to readjust. So, when our God-image changes, then we have to change. When our world-image is adjusted, we are confused or even depressed for a while.

We mend and renew the world by strengthening inside ourselves what we seek outside ourselves, and not by demanding it of others or trying to force it on others.

If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.

We become what we are willing to see.

The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting, pushing or pulling, you cannot be contemplative. When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic. You can take that as axiomatic: in most cases, you become a mirror image of both what you oppose and what you love (see Ephesians 5:14).

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

Before transformation, sin is any kind of moral mistake; afterward, sin is a mistake about who you are and whose you are.

Stinking thinking" is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking, or how we process our reality.

This marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is all for the sake of astonishment! It's for divine transformation (theosis), not intellectual or "small-self" coziness.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.