Quotes about Transformation

Perhaps it has never struck you how consistently the great religious teachers and founders leave home, go on pilgrimage to far-off places, do a major turnabout, choose downward mobility; and how often it is their parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities, and often even civil authorities who fight against them.

God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

That is the rub of any conversion experience: We only realize how much we needed it when we are on the other side! That is why we need the tenacity of faith and hope to carry us across to most transformational experiences. When we can let others actually influence us and change us, our heart space is open.

in fact, that's largely what it means to be loving. You can hold for them what they cannot yet hold. You can transform for them what they cannot yet transform. You do that by not returning their negativity and fear in kind, as most people will do.

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.

It is all one continuum of Incarnation. Who we are in God is who we all are. Everything else is changing and passing away.

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless. It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

All we can do is keep our egos out of the way, note and weep over our defensive behaviors, keep our various centers from closing down—and the Presence that is surely the Highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing, and immediately effective. The immediate embrace is from God's side.

On a man's journey, everything has its place. Our failures, heartbreaks, defeats, and victories; our wounds, dreams, and passions; our stops and our starts-all have a place in our story, and all have a place in our transformation from shadow men to real men. Everything has meaning, and everything belongs.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.