Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Religion, it seems to me, has nothing whatsoever to do with any belief, with any priest, with any church or so-called sacred book. The state of the religious mind can be understood only when we begin to understand what beauty is; and the understanding of beauty must be approached through total aloneness.

To feel the presence of the Lord is an amazing thing.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

God has been everlastingly working in Silence, unobserved, unheard, except by those who experience His Infinite Silence. Those who have got the courage and wisdom to surrender themselves to a Perfect Master are the recipients of His Grace.

It's hard to rest knowing that millions of people merely carry on religious traditions but don't actually reach God.

God is still in the business of coming down to earth: to this cubicle, this email, this room, this house, this job, this hospital room, this car, this bed, this vacation. Any place can become Bethel, the house of God. Cleveland, maybe. Or the chair you're sitting in as you read these words.

In the retail business, many people are too consumed with the bottom line. How much am I going to be selling? Am I going to be able to do all the things I need to get done? Instead, if they are at peace and feeling good about themselves - if they are treating customers with love and acting as statesmen and stateswomen and people who are connected to God in a spiritual sense - then every day for them is a real joy.

To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.

The gate of heaven is everywhere.

Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.

Open your eyes and the whole world is full of God.

But for me the sweetest contact with God has no form. I close my eyes, look within, and enter a deep soft silence. The infinity of God's creation embraces me.

People talk about universal intelligence ... I'm reticent to believe almost anything, just because my parents weren't religious at all, but that's when I feel it. People talk about being in the "flow."

All spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and nature is a window into that wonder.

The kingdom of God is just behind the darkness of closed eyes, and the first gate that opens to it is your peace.

I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature.

I want to breathe in the Spiritual.

The unconscious is the only available source of religious experience. This in certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience might be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge.

Who I am in Christ is amazing. Who Christ is in me is the real story. It is beyond amazing.

It is only through meditation that purity comes. Meditation means jumping out of the mind. There is no need to purify the mind, it can be put aside. One can become disidentified with the mind. To know "I am not the mind," is real purity because then you are only consciousness, awareness, a witnessing. To live twenty-four hours a day as a witness is the way of the sannyasin.

I believe the only way we can reach the Kingdom of Heaven is to have the Kingdom of Heaven in our hearts.

Begin now, as you read these words, as you sit in your chair, to offer your whole selves, utterly and in joyful abandon, in quiet, glad surrender to Him who is within. In secret ejaculations of praise, turn in humble wonder to the Light, faint though it may be.

The people that weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience that I had when I painted it.

I got religion in the airport, my Lord. They caught me waiting on my baggage when I was bored.