The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
I think we are worlds compressed into human form.
The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?
The body always expresses the spirit whose envelope it is. And for him who can see, the nude offers the richest meaning.
The spirit, if it could be seen with mortal eyes, would appear in bodily shape like a full-grown person with individual endowments that make it a counter-part of the body in which it [resides,] "that which is temporal in the likeness of that which is spiritual." (D&C 77:2.) It was that which came from God and entered at birth into the infant body prepared by its mortal parents. The spirit was of the "Lord from heaven." The physical body was "of the earth, earthy," (2 Cor. 15:47) or in other words, composed of the elements of which the things in the physical world are composed.
Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
My body is a projection of my consciousness.
To live in this precious animal body on this earth is as great a part of spiritual life as anything else.
An old body when it is loved becomes a sacred treasure; and sex itself must always, it seems to me, come to us as a sacrament and be so used or it is meaningless. The flesh is suffused by the spirit, and it is forgetting this in the act of love-making that creates cynicism and despair.
The spirit desires to remain with its body, because, without the organic instruments of that body, it can neither act, nor feel anything.
Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.
I am the visible part of the invisible Christ. He is the invisible part of the visible me.
The church is not a religious community of worshippers of Christ but is Christ himself who has taken form among people.
It's like being possessed: like a psychic or a medium. I felt like a hollow temple filled with many spirits, each one passing through me, each inhabiting me for a little time and then leaving to be replaced by another.
Culture is religion incarnate.
My dance is a sacred poem in which each movement is a word and whose every word is underlined by music. The temple in which I dance can be vague or faithfully reproduced, for I am the temple.
The Gospel was not meant merely to reside in our intellect, memories, and tongues, but to be seen in our lives.
The illuminated ones can take any form -- a man, a woman, a child, an elder, or even a dog. It is not inconsequential that the English language allows for the dyslexia of the spelling of the word dog: God spelled backward.
God is man idealized.
The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room able as Jesus' hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually (without ceasing), to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with His ears with every waking moment.
I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
Sri Ramakrishna is far greater than the disciples understand him to be. He is the embodiment of infinite spiritual ideas capable of development in infinite ways....One glance of his gracious eyes can create a hundred thousand Vivekanandas at this instant. If he chooses now, instead, to work through me, making me his instrument, I can only bow to his will.
The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
God must have said, "I know what I'll do, I'll send my Love right down there where they are. And I'll send it as a tiny baby, so they'll have to touch it, and they'll have to hold it close."
Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs... It is like being haunted by the Holy Ghost.
