Sunday, if I'm lucky, I'll go to church or listen to some good spiritual advice on the television or on the radio. I take three or four baths to try to cleanse myself, so I'm fresh for Monday.
The spiritual aspect of my work has more to do with the sense that things in the world can be perceived and accepted as being in some respect alive. I try to approach everything that I photograph with this sense of wide-eyed awe.
There are laws in some countries, I believe, which prohibit anyone from following you in the street, and if someone does, he can be arrested and put into prison. So, spiritually, I wish there were a police system which would put people into a spiritual prison for following others. In fact, it does happen automatically.
Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.
Encountering sufferings will definitely contribute to the elevation of your spiritual practice, provided you are able to transform calamity and misfortune into the path.
The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief.
The ideal that marriage aims at is that of spiritual union through the physical. The human love that it incarnates is intended to serve as a stepping stone to diving or universal love.
We all want to live a happy life and have a right to do so, whether through work or spiritual practice. I'm subject to destructive emotions like anger and jealousy the same as you, but we all have potential for good too. However, our existing education system is oriented towards material development; neglecting inner values. Consequently we lack a clear awareness of the inner values that are the basis of a happy life.
Whenever we encounter the Infinite in man, however imperfectly understood, we treat it with respect. Whether in the synagogue, the mosque, the pagoda, or the wigwam, there is a hideous aspect which we execrate and a sublime aspect which we venerate. So great a subject for spiritual contemplation, such measureless dreaming - the echo of God on the human wall!
There is nothing as precious to man as a sound mind in a sound body and it is essential that the physical well being of our people merits as much attention as its spiritual welfare
We must not forget that what I mean by the conquest of the world by spiritual thought is the sending out of the life-giving principles, not the hundreds of superstitions that we have been hugging to our breasts for centuries.
As the shell, the pith and the kernel of the fruit are all produced form one parent seed of the tree, so from the one Lord is produced the whole of creation, animate and inanimate, spiritual and material.