“Discipline is the basic set of tools we use to solve life’s problems.”
“Problems call forth our courage and wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”
“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with.”
“If a child sees his parents day in and day out behaving with self-discipline, restraint, dignity, and a capacity to order their own lives, then the child will come to feel in the deepest fibers of his being that this is the way to live.”
“The feeling of being valuable—“I am a valuable person”—is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.”
“Good discipline requires time.”
“Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”
“We must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it.”
(Accept responsibility, dedication to reality, balancing, delayed gratification)
“Truth or reality is avoided when it is painful. We can revise our maps only when we have the discipline to overcome that pain.”
“The life of wisdom must be contemplation combined with action.”
“By their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open, and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.”
“The discipline of bracketing illustrates the most consequential fact of giving up and of discipline in general: namely, that for all that is given up even more is gained.”
(re: discipline) “You must start at the beginning and go through the middle.”
Love: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
“The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
“Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.”
“Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.”
“The only true end of love is spiritual growth or human evolution.”
“Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. … It is leadership.” (means requiring judgment)
“Love is a complicated rather than simple activity, requiring the participation of one’s entire being—the head as well as the heart.”
“The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting.”
“True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love.”
The act of love requires the moving against the inertia of laziness (work) or the resistance engendered by fear (courage).
“Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.”
“The genuine lover always perceived the beloved as someone who has a totally separate identity.”
“Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth.”
“Individual growth and spiritual growth are interdependent, but it is always and inevitably lonely out on the growing edge.”
“Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmatism?”
“When we are reading a book and come across an idea of theory that appeals to us, that “rings a bell” with us, we “recognize” it to be true. Yet this idea or theory may be one of which we have never before consciously thought. The word says we “re-know” the concept, as if we knew it once upon a time, forgot it, but then recognized it as an old friend. It is as if all knowledge and all wisdom were contained in our minds, and when we learn “something new” we are actually only discovering something that existed in our self all along.”
“The mind, which sometimes presumes to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle, is itself a miracle.”
“The lazy part of the self, like the devil that it may actually be, is unscrupulous and specializes in treacherous disguise. It cloaks its own laziness in all manner of rationalizations, which the more growing part of the self is still too weak to see through easily or to combat.”
“Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness.”
“Love is the antithesis of laziness. Ordinary laziness is a passive failure to love.”
“If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself. If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you. What this suggests is that the interface between God and man is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us.”
(Unconscious=rhizome, large and rich hidden root system that nourishes the tiny plant sprouting temporarily on the surface: “a splinter of the infinite deity”)
“In my vision the collective unconscious is God; the conscious is man as individual; and the personal unconscious is the interface between them. Being this interface, it is inevitable that the personal unconscious should be a place of some turmoil, the scene of some struggle between God’s will and the will of the individual.”
“If the bud of consciousness that grows from the rhizome of the unconscious God can become itself God, then God will have assumed a new life form. This is the meaning of our individual existence. We are born that we might become, as a conscious individual, a new life form of God.”
“Everyone wants to be loved. But first we must make ourselves lovable. We do this by becoming ourselves loving, disciplined human beings.”