The Unclad Soul

“Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.” – Mark Nepo, Poet/Philosopher/Author

“You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you.” ~ Wilhelm Reich, Austrian Psychoanalyst/Author

“It’s not what you look at that matters; it’s what you see.”  ~ Henry David Thoreau

Fundamentalism in religion is primarily the result of a literal interpretation of a sacred text. This is where it starts. This is how it is fueled. It is an approach where compromise is unacceptable, where the whole text has dominance over any individual passage. Consequently, in the fundamentalist’s mind, everything in their sacred text is pure, r ight, and infallible. The Christian Bible, the Muslim Koran, the Jewish Torah or Old Testament, are the three primary sacred texts that are often taken by their individual groups of believers as literally true in every word. Hindus have the Bhagavad Gita but they do not worship it in the sense these other religions do their Books. Buddhists have no holy text but instead are guided by sutras or the sayings and teachings of Buddha. Rarely do you see fundamentalists among Hindus or Buddhists. I have read from all of these sacred texts. The Bible is the only book I have read completely through and it seemed to take me forever to do it; wh...

  “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” ~ Emerson

“Being the ‘best you can be’ is really only possible when  you are  deeply connected to another.  Splendid isolation  is for planets, not people.”  ~ Sue Johnson, Clinical Psychologist/Author