Therefore, in order to take care of you, I have to take care of myself.

We let individualism prevail in the twentieth century, and frankly, we have made a mess of it. We must begin anew for the twenty-first century; we need a new, different direction. We can no longer continue destroying ourselves and the planet we live on. With determination we can abandon the cult of individualism and the self, and act and live in harmony, in the spirit of interbeing.

To build community, it is important to accept the insight of interbeing, of interconnectedness. We must realize that happiness is not an individual matter. Finding happiness through our separate, individual self is impossible.

Beauty and goodness are there in each of us. A true spiritual partner is one who encourages you to look deep inside yourself for the beauty and love you've been seeking. A true teacher is someone who helps you discover the teacher in yourself.

You must always check things out by going to the person in question and asking for his or her help: "Dear one, I am suffering so much, help me please.

The measure of society is how it treats the weakest members.

May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.

What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is.

Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.

As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be "as gods." We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us.

I must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. My

I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.