As a cell contains a natural intelligence by which it fosters the healthy functioning of the body, I, too, have natural intelligence that fosters the perfect unfolding of my life.

As we become purer channels for God‘s light, we develop an appetite for the sweetness that is possible in this world. A miracle worker is not geared toward fighting the world that is, but toward creating the world that could be.

When we are truly aware of our spiritual glory, a varicose vein or two is not that big a deal.

I think the heartbreak of September 11 – America’s grief not only over the loss of life but also the loss of our own innocence – has expanded us as people because it has tenderized our hearts. On a psychological level, the American people have matured as a result of that awful day.

I read an article somewhere that stated 1 in 4 American women will be considered clinically depressed in their lifetime. This should be more than a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies – it should be a wake-up call.

Politics in America is like stale bread. It’s so yada yada that the best among us can hardly stand it.

In most of our situations in life, if we take a good honest look at our lives, we are holding to small, limiting thoughts, cynical thoughts.

We need to shift from an economic organizing principle for human civilization, to a humanitarian organizing principle. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it’s a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.

Institutional memory is important in any organization, but so are fresh ideas.

There’s a certain je ne sais quoi that Americans have in spades – a we-can-do-anything spirit that makes so many things possible for all of us. We’re rugged individualists, aspirational in nature, and we like to think for ourselves.

We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present.

Anyone who isn’t confused or conflicted on the topic of Israel probably isn’t looking into it too deeply.

Charles Manson ate apples. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to.

I think every writer lives for the thought that there will be a moment when somebody reads something on the page and says, “Yes!”

If I just want to ‘start a conversation,’ I don’t need to run for office. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that many people are more open to hearing you if you’re not running for office.

When my sister was diagnosed with cancer in 1989, her doctor told her that the cancer had probably been in her system for 10 years. By the time cancer’s diagnosed, it’s usually been around for quite a while.

The Law of Divine Compensation posits that this is a self-organizing and self-correcting universe: the embryo becomes a baby, the bud becomes a blossom, the acorn becomes an oak tree. Clearly, there is some invisible force that is moving every aspect of reality to its next best expression.

In Taoist philosophy, ‘yin‘ is the feminine principle, representing the forces of earth, while ‘yang‘ is the masculine principle, representing spirit.

Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.

Major political parties have a role, but they are incapable of initiating fundamental change because they are fundamentally tied to the status quo. They are the status quo.

Old systems do not fold willingly, particularly when they control gargantuan amounts of wealth and power. But like empires of old – from the Romans to the Hapsburgs to the colonial British – even the largest do fall.

God exists in eternity. The only point where eternity meets time is in the present. The present is the only time there is.

Being a parent gives you historical perspective. You have thoughts about how you fit into a larger generational drama – those who came before and those who will come after.

My biggest past mistakes have been when I made decisions out of ego rather than spirit. When I acted too quickly. When I wasn’t contemplative or reflective or prayerful enough, and I ended up making what I would only later see to be unwise decisions.

‘Accepting the Christ‘ is merely a shift in self-perception.

Martin Luther King said it was time to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of human civilization. I don’t think anyone is calling Martin Luther King a New Age woo-woo.

One of the shocks of a 50th birthday is realizing the fundamental fact that your youth is irrevocably over.

Today’s average American is more apt to rebel against a tennis shoe not coming in the right color than against the slow erosion of our democratic freedom.

Our key to transforming anything lies in our ability to reframe it.

The primary social contract between the people of the United States and their government – quaint though it might seem to even mention it at this point – is that ours is to be a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’

We have the same soul at 60 that we had at 40, and the same soul at 25 that we had when we were 5.

The fact that people in Hollywood are open to what I teach is not because they’re more desperate than anyone else, but because they’re more touched by it. That’s not their weakness. It’s their strength!

Try to see the good in others. When you’re tempted to judge someone, make an effort to see their goodness. Your willingness to look for the best in people will subconsciously bring it forth.

People with AIDS, cancer and other illnesses need free nonmedical support services.

At their peak, religion and psychotherapy become one.

Spiritual ‘exercise‘ keeps your mind in shape the way physical exercise keeps your body in shape.

Americans are good people, and at times we can be wise. But we’re often under-informed by media, misinformed by our government and ill-served by both.

Divine organization is inherent in all things.

An enchanted love, an awakened love, between two people is a blessing on the entire world.

It’s tempting, when confronted by political malfeasance, to become so absorbed with its symptom that we give too little attention to treating its cause.

Doug Motel makes ‘conscious comedy‘. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think.

Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.

I try to remind myself not to go anywhere or do anything without asking for spiritual direction through prayer and meditation.

Love is everywhere, but if our eyes aren’t open to see it, we miss out. Who among us hasn’t missed out on love because we were looking for it in one package and it came in another? Our problem is rarely a lack of love so much as a mental block to our awareness of its presence.*

I love prayer candles, and I use them often.

People who attend support groups who have been diagnosed with a life-challenging illness live on average twice as long after diagnosis as people who don’t.

In all the great religious systems, there are divine beings who represent the feminine face of the divine.

By my mid-20s, I was a total mess.

I’ve known Dennis Kucinich for a long time, and I don’t think I have illusions about him. Sometimes I find him pompous, male chauvinistic, intellectually unbending. But he is a good man, and a serious one.

Nothing is so dangerous for our security as large groups of desperate people.

Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don’t see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself.

Everything we do is infused with the energy in which we do it. If we’re frantic, life will be frantic. If we are peaceful, life will be peaceful.

If you give your life as a wholehearted response to love, then love will wholeheartedly respond to you.

Old Newtonian physics claimed that things have an objective reality separate from our perception of them. Quantum physics, and particularly Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, reveal that, as our perception of an object changes, the object itself literally changes.

Self-awareness is not self-centeredness, and spirituality is not narcissism. ‘Know thyself‘ is not a narcissistic pursuit.

Ironically, it is when we identify with our spirits rather than our bodies that we are most powerful on the material plane. Our overidentification with the world does not give us power within the world so much as it diminishes our power here. It makes us frightened and nervous and full of anxiety.

Just as you wouldn’t leave the house without taking a shower, you shouldn’t start the day without at least 10 minutes of sacred practice: prayer, meditation, inspirational reading.

Empires always have the hubris to think they are indestructible, when in fact they are always unsustainable.

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it’s increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Now if you know what makes one person‘s life change, then you know what makes a nation change – because a nation is simply a large group of individuals.

When God created the world, he didn’t draw a line between Canada and America.

The basic premise of ‘A Course in Miracles‘ is that it teaches us to relinquish thoughts based on fear and to accept instead thoughts based on love.

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure about you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.

In the absence of love, we began slowly but surely to fall apart.

If someone thinks homosexuality is immoral, they have a right to believe that.

God is limitless in His love, and asks that we at least make the effort to be limitless in ours.

I now see that is a woman‘s God-given role to tend to the home and take care of the children: it’s just that the entire planet is our home, and every child on it is one of our children.

We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?

The point of Jesus‘ existence wasn’t to lessen or diminish our appreciation of each other, but to expand our appreciation of each other by reminding us what lies within all of us, because Jesus was an example of the pinnacle of human evolution.

We Liberals like to think our thoughts aren’t controlled. We pride ourselves on our independent thinking. We know we shouldn’t believe everything we read. We realize the media is skewed, we know it’s owned by a small group of people, we realize it’s biased, etc.

When America does what’s right, it’s such a light on this planet.

Love is all around us all the time. Love is the ethers that we swim in. Love is the amniotic fluid of the soul.

Most women I know are priestesses and healers… We are, all of us, sisters of a mysterious order.

Look at Fukushima. Should we or should we not agree with the U.S. government that none of that radioactive energy is making its way here? Hello!

Relationships are eternal. The ‘separation‘ is another chapter in the relationship. Often, letting go of the old form of the relationship becomes a lesson in pure love much deeper than any would have learned had the couple stayed together.

An educated child earns more later in life, knows how to keep their own children from dying, produces more food, is less likely to get AIDS, and in the case of boys, is less likely to engage in armed civil conflict.

I want to be a cheerleader for women who have never even considered running for office or being involved in a campaign, but who in the quietness of their hearts might think, ‘Why not me?’

Unforgiveness is like drinking poison yourself and waiting for the other person to die.

I don’t think I represent some new category. I think I do represent kind of a freethinker.

The spiritual path – is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it.

Some pain is simply the normal grief of human existence. That is pain that I try to make room for. I honor my grief.

One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.

I’m an author. And writers write books. And writing books is a full-time career.

As we mature through the years, we access more deeply information we had only abstractly understood before.

People crave comfort, people crave connection, people crave community.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.

Whatever it is that leads human beings to hate, to destroy, and to kill has taken on a collective force like never before, as technology and globalization now give it the capacity to not just strike, but to strike us all, together, as one.

The world cannot evolve if girls refuse to become women.

I have a gruff side. This is not exactly news… At the same time, anyone who wants to judge me for this can walk a mile in my moccasins. And then we’ll talk.

Tragedy takes us to the very state of consciousness which, were we to hold to it, would go far toward preventing further tragedies.

You can’t ‘work through worry and fear rationally,’ because fear isn’t rational!

Priests, ministers and rabbis are asking where the children are going. Slowly but surely, they’re seeing that people are hungry for something beyond the doctrine. It isn’t that they don’t want religious truth. But they want the mystical core, the heart of the religious truth.

There are two distinctly, almost surreally different narratives in Israel and Palestine… and to a great extent, both are right and both are wrong. Both peoples have suffered greatly and both have legitimate grievances against the other.

Romance is one of the sacred temples that dot the landscape of life.

Today, most Americans are too cynical, or tired, or both, to even approximate our Founders‘ courageous repudiation of injustice.

Environmentally, the planet will not sustain the kind of abuse it receives at our hands.

Religion is like a map. The route isn’t important. It’s the destination that matters.

Anyone seeking a real solution in Israel and Palestine rejects the us-versus-them mentality entirely.

All of us wish we’d had perfect childhoods, with a mother and father who modeled ideal parental attitudes and taught us to internalize the tenets of self-love. Many of us, however, did not.

Being a mother makes everything more urgent.

Only do what you feel called in your heart to do, and then give all of yourself to the task.

Spirit is impervious to illness.

Some men know that a light touch of the tongue, running from a woman’s toes to her ears, lingering in the softest way possible in various places in between, given often enough and sincerely enough, would add immeasurably to world peace.

I can’t say that there are ‘things’ that make me come alive. There are thoughts that make me come alive.

Each of us has an inner room where we can visit to be cleansed of fear-based thoughts and feelings. This room, the holy of holies, is a sanctuary of light.

The Western world is having an identity crisis.

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a lost decade.

I know I’m not a great writer. I’m an extremely gifted oral communicator, but when it comes to writing, I’m just a beginner.

If anything is naive and lightweight, it’s the traditional political conversation.

I trust that when people meet, we meet for a transcendent reason, and that the challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul’s growth.

An angry generation will not bring peace to the world; I do believe that.

When you’ve written 10 books and have six on the New York Times best-seller list – and four have been No. 1 – I think you have a right to be a member of Congress.

Judaism is interesting in that there is something there that I think you just can’t understand if you’re not a Jew – it moves into a realm of true mystery.

I place my life in the hands of God each day. And I trust that He knows what He’s doing, even when I do not.

The whole Obama phenomenon brings up memories from my distant past: the good-looking guy who talks real good, whose line you don’t buy immediately but whose charm is so dazzling that he gradually convinces you that this time it will be different.

Your relationship to food is but a reflection of your relationship to yourself, as is everything in your life.

I never thought being famous would be wonderful, but my limited exposure to celebrity has shown me the dark side big-time.

People on a spiritual path – personal growth, spiritual practice, recovery, yoga and so forth – are the last people who should be sitting out the social and political issues of our day.

Jesus was a human being who, while on Earth, completely self-actualized and fulfilled in all ways the potential glory that lies within us all.

The man I love may decide tomorrow that he loves me no more – but if my heart remains open, I will endure the storm.

When I was just writing books and giving lectures, if people disagreed, they just didn’t buy your book or attend your lectures. But, if you’re leading a congregation, people feel they have the right to tell you what you should or shouldn’t talk about. And that hasn’t always been easy for me.

I want a woman president – really, I do.

The force that keeps the planets revolving around the sun would be glad to handle the circumstances of your life, if only you would ask him to.

Take stock of your thoughts and behavior. Each night ask yourself, when were you negative when you could have been positive? When did you withhold love when you might have given it? When did you play a neurotic game instead of behaving in a powerful way? Use this process to self-correct.

Politics should not be the least heart-filled thing we do, it should be the most heart-filled thing we do.

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.

We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.

Forgiving the past means remembering the love there, and releasing all the rest as the illusion that it really was.

Family relationships trigger childhood wounds, and those wounds often trump our rational thinking. We can’t ‘rationally’ transcend the kind of primal pain that such relationships can arouse.

In God, there is no lack and no recession.

Throughout my career I have been an advocate for women, in all aspects of their lives.

I have known healthy, wealthy people who were depressed, and people with critical illnesses who could honestly attest to joy.

The world is a holographic universe, with every piece containing the whole.

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

We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.

The key to abundance is meeting limited circumstances with unlimited thoughts.

There’s nothing more powerful than a woman who knows how to contain her power and not let it leak, standing firmly within it in mystery and silence. A woman who talks too much sheds her allure.

We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what’s wrong in your life, or you can focus on what’s right.

Trust is very hard if you don’t know what you’re trusting.

In our society, as people pass out of young adulthood, they tend to relate to themselves more in terms of what they are no longer than what they are now, and that’s psychologically low-grade devastating.

I would never, ever in my life say, ‘I want to go to Washington to heal the soul of Washington.’

The week ahead is already programmed for fabulousness. Pray that your thinking be aligned with the force that makes it so.

We tend to lack humility toward love, to patronize it rather than bow before it, to put mundane considerations before the emotional need to hold someone in our arms.

Many people are despairing of the possibility of finding love. And some of the people who are despairing the most are in their thirties and forties and looking just great.

Politics is in a crisis because it’s separated from our deep humanity.

Enchanted partnership begins with the conscious understanding, on the part of two people, that the purpose of their relationship is not so much material as spiritual, and the internal skills demanded by it are prodigious.

Nothing liberates our greatness like the desire to help, the desire to serve.

When I went to college in the 1970s, the Women’s Liberation movement was all the buzz.

We live in a world of easy friendships – people here for you when it’s easy, ‘so-sorry-but-I-have-an-errand-to-do-now’ when it’s not.

Spiritual principles do not change, but we do.

Any man who holds a woman back is not a man a woman can afford to be with.

I tell my mother I went to God in spite of my religious education. I feel that my religious education was inadequate, but that doesn’t mean that Judaism was inadequate.

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

I believe the Israelis have been wronged, but they also have a lot to apologize for. And I believe the Palestinians have been wronged, but they have a lot to apologize for, as well.

Many times in life, we say we want change but are then terrified when the opportunity for it arrives.

God is definitely out of the closet.

In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned, slaves to our appetites and our will to false power.

Any conversation which does not include the context of the journey of the heart is by definition untrue to who we are as human beings.

Our past is a story existing only in our minds. Look, analyze, understand, and forgive. Then, as quickly as possible, chuck it.

God goes with me everywhere, because God is in my mind.

Marriage, like everything else in the world, is holy or unholy depending on the purpose the mind ascribes to it.

There’s no reason to think that you’ll be capable of loyalty to a diet until you address your basic disloyalty toward yourself.

It doesn’t take money to turn off the television and cultivate real bonding time.

The same group of New York pseudo-intellectuals who’ve put down prayer are the same ones who put down L.A.

As citizens of the United States, we are stewards of this magnificent thing called democracy.

The human race is evolving to the realization that what is happening on the level of consciousness both precedes and determines what happens in the world.

I’m proud to say I was part of a movement in which we sang ‘All You Need Is Love’ at political rallies.

Physical circumstances have very little to do with either our capacity to love or to attract love.

Fear is trusting in your own power.

While overeating would be seen by some as an indulgence of self, it is in fact a profound rejection of self. It is a moment of self-betrayal and self-punishment, and anything but a commitment to one’s own well-being.

For many, many people, getting married is one of the most important things they will ever do in the pursuit of happiness.

Hope lies in having more faith in the power of God to heal us than in the power of anything to hurt or destroy us. In realizing that as children of God we are bigger than our problems, we have the power at last to confront them.

I trust life not because I trust the world, but because I trust the God who lives in my heart.

Become more accepting. With every interaction, surrender any tendency to judge another person. Pray for a more accepting heart.

Corporate totalitarianism means total control by corporate interests. If they want a war, they get a war. If they want GMOs, they get GMOs. If they want fracking, they get fracking. If they want big banks to control our monetary policy, big banks control our monetary policy.

Donald Trump is an innocent child of God, and the democratically chosen president-elect of the United States. We must deeply bow before the first and deeply respect the second.

Nature is infinitely creative. It is always producing the possibility of new beginnings.

As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.

The undue influence of money on our politics is like a cancer underlying other cancers, the issue underlying all other issues.

A threat to our freedom is a threat to our freedom, whether from a terrorist or from a trade deal.