John Burnside Quotes

It is so easy for your people to forget that everything has a spirit, that all are equal. That magic and mystery are a part of your lives, not something to store away in a child's bedroom, or to use as an escape from your lives.

If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.

The spiritual reality of the Indian world is very evident, very highly developed. I think it affects the life of every Indian person in one way or another.

I don't want to participate in traditional Indian religious ceremonies - dance in a sun dance or pray in a sweat lodge or go on a vision quest with the help of a medicine man. The power of these ceremonies has an appeal, but I'm content with what little religion I already have.

As told in Friendship with God, if we simply decided to believe and act as if first, we're all one, and second, life is eternal, it would render virtually everything we've done all our lives pointless.

Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.

A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.

I heard stories from my mother's mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.

Body and spirit are twins: God only knows which is which.

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

The groves were God's first temples.

One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.

The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.

Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.

If you look back to the earliest religions, before they got organized and started building churches and amassing wealth, they all sprang from the same place - they were inspired by nature.

To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.

If you're trained in metaphysics, you don't see the world as distinct from yourself. You are one with the world.

I am not religious in any way, but I have a pagan ideology and pagan values.

I used to know things intellectually, but now I feel them. Now I feel that my body is part of nature, so being sick is just a process of nature, and death is a process of nature, and being reborn through the soil is a process of nature.

Ninety-nine percent of the things that seem weird in my life can be answered with my religion. Paganism is mostly about nature-worship. It's about being in harmony with your environment and bringing the world of spirit and world of man together. It's about balance.

The Indians believe all things have spirit - even the hail that comes from the sky is spirit. If you believe that, which I implicitly do, everything is alive.

The soul is joined to and is separated from the body. Therefore, the soul is corporeal.

Animals have been talking to me. And any shaman will say that that's not that weird.

Through art, mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men. They are the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them.