We must embrace the imperfection in our parents before we can embrace the imperfection in ourselves.
The costume is everything.
Adversity is the source of our deepest growth and greatest blessings; embrace it, dare to seek it.
We invent nothing, truly. We borrow and re-create. We uncover and discover. All has been given, as the mystics say. We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is.
A human being is part of a whole called by us "Universe", a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison to us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
As we expand, we melt. Our hearts open. Our thinking changes. Our obsessions subside, our addictions quietly pass away. This is the slow, elegant, loving process through which, little by little, we let go of the old and welcome the new. We open our hearts and allow in a few more people, just a few more relationship experiences, just a few more kinds of relationships. We learn there are no mistakes, and our hearts become a circle so large that there are no more boundaries, no differences, no judgments. We know the graciousness of that great undivided familiarity, in which there are no more strangers, only friends.
We stretch, and to our amazement we don't break. Instead, we grow. Suddenly, everything becomes easier, and our hearts, which once we believed could love only one person, or were battered so badly we thought they could never love again, expand so fully that the whole world is welcome. In such a state of openness, we see that we've only forgotten how to be together, we faintly and beautifully remember that once we were all together. We remember the way we were in a universe of incredible softness where there were no edges, no walls, no mind games, no rules. In that incredible world, we were happy. We loved one another. It wasn't a feeling. It was a state of being called joy.
The future of love is this all-encompassing embrace. For when we have expanded so much, we will finally arrive at a place where the heart can open its doors to everything and everyone. Our souls have been taking us on this journey and Love is the magnificent destination to which they have been leading us. Now we can feel joy. Now, at last, we can be satisfied. Now, finally, we are home.
Founders have to be embraced and empowered within the organization, but their strengths have to be strategically channeled.
On the whole, we think that the greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done, and that there are yet in store for our peoples, and for the causes that we uphold, grander triumphs than have ever yet been scored. But be this as it may, we gladly agree that the one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men.
