“Real zeal is standing still and letting God be a bonfire in you.”
Source: Poustinia (1975), Ch. 5
Playing Pastor Michael Curtis in the Lifetime movie "Christmas Child," 2003 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346750/
“Real zeal is standing still and letting God be a bonfire in you.”
Source: Poustinia (1975), Ch. 5
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, "Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover," and you have to say, "Where were they? Point to them!" And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.
But they weren't, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.
Values Voter Presidential Debate, September 17, 2007 http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/transcript.php?id=429 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hCKZmkF0VU
2000s, 2006-2009
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Context: And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.
“God in the depths of us receives God who comes to us: it is God contemplating God.”
Quoted in An Anthology of Mysticism and Mystical Philosophy' (1927) by William Kingsland, God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves. His acting in us is nearer and more inward than our own actions. God works in us from inside outwards; creatures work on us from the outside p. 94
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. … It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run established or proved itself in any other way. Religions have approved themselves; they have ministered to sundry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first religions were supplanted.