Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.
Ideally, when Christians meet, as Christians do, to take counsel together, their purpose is not ( or should not be) to ascertain what is the mind of the majority but what is the mind of the Holy Spirit - something which may be quite different.
Music has given me peace. I can remember occasions when music instantly tranquillized my
mind, when I was greatly agitated over something. Music has helped me to overcome anger.
Just one quality of the Buddha has to be remembered. He consists only of one quality: witnessing. This small word witnessing contains the whole of spirituality. Witness that you are not the body. Witness that you are not the mind. Witness that you are only a witness. As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. That is what is called ecstasy.
Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion.
Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.