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There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places QUOTES

There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places QUOTES

1 " So I do fear death in the sense that I find the prospect of dying pretty scary. But I no longer fear that I will one day be annihilated and cease to exist. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

2 " The very sense of wondering is God wondering. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

3 " Trying to understand the meaning of life in terms of the human brain's activities is like trying to understand the ocean by going to the shore and scooping out a bucket of water and analyzing it. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

4 " Much of the contemporary American atheistic movement seems to be treating atheism like a new kind of religion. ... It's just that some atheists are so damn evangelical about their nonreligion they might as well be ringing doorbells and handing out leaflets. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

5 " Much of the contemporary American atheistic movement seems to be treating atheism like a new kind of religion.  .... It's just that some atheists are so damn evangelical about their nonreligion they might as well be ringing doorbells and handing out leaflets.  "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

6 " If we can all agree that none of us really knows what God actually is, maybe we can stop fighting about what we imagine God to be. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

7 " In order to deal with the fear of annihilation you have to face annihilation again and again and again. It’s not enough just to understand this intellectually. It’s not enough just to read about this. You need to watch yourself being annihilated right now. If you can manage to sit quietly as you disappear from existence moment by moment, then you can see it’s really nothing to be afraid of. You gotta meditate. Nobody likes to hear that. But it’s true. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

8 " The only way I know of to get in touch with what God wants is to be very, very, very quiet. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

9 " God is not the possession of any religion. If anything, religion can be a path away from God. God cannot be bound up inside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Those are just community centers where people gather to hang out with their friends. God is no more to be found in those places than he is in rock clubs or back-alley bars. God is in the wilderness, and God is in the city. Everywhere you go God is there. God walks with you. God is you, and God is the very act of walking. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

10 " If you don’t want to be grabbed by God,” Zen teacher Jiyu Kennet said, “don’t stare at a wall. Definitely don’t sit still. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

11 " Sincerity in this case is not just honesty. It's something deeper than that. The word is used to indicate a state that is completely open and unaffected. It is us, as we truly are, without any attempt to disguise ourselves, even in the ways we usually disguise ourselves to ourselves. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

12 " One of the things the brain does is create an image of the self. Like all its images, the image of the self is by necessity incomplete. But it's a model that is usually useful for most of the activities we engage in. The problem is that we believe that these various incomplete and mistaken images our brain has created--including the image of our self--are reality. We think we are perceiving and conceiving of reality when, in fact, reality is beyond our perceptive ability and our powers of conception. At the same time, however, we are living in reality. The fact that we cannot grasp the totality of what we're living in doesn't change this. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

13 " What you get when you try to understand the meaning of life intellectually is just one tiny slice of life. Even if you understand that tiny slice very thoroughly, you still won't really have understood the fullness of life. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

14 " You're going to lose your life anyway. It may be now. It may be decades from now. But at some point it's going to happen, and you have no idea when or how. So it's important to be true to yourself at every moment. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

15 " But the past and future do exist. They exist right here, right now. We are the expression of our past, and our actions now create our future. Past and future are intimately present with us at this real moment. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

16 " When we forget God we make as big a mistake as we do when we insist that our concept of God is the only one that matters. When we forget God we treat one another and the world we live in as objects. We fail to recognize that whenever we harm someone else or the world we live in, we only harm ourselves. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

17 " Shikantaza proceeds from the view that all our thoughts and perceptions are by necessity incomplete and, to either a large or small degree, mistaken. There is no way to encompass reality in your mind. The brain does its job, in part, by deliberately ignoring most of the data it receives and by focusing only on the material it needs. Furthermore, the data the brain receives is itself already limited to what our senses are able to perceive. One of the things the brain does is create an image of the self. Like all its images, the image of the self is by necessity incomplete. But it’s a model that is usually useful for most of the activities we engage in. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places

18 " In Alcoholics Anonymous they say you need to have faith in a higher power to help you overcome your addictions. You can’t do it alone, they say. I like that approach. Perhaps if we have faith — trust and commitment, that is — in the universe we live in as God, we can work together to find the solutions we so desperately need. We aren’t living things inhabiting a dead universe. The universe we live in is, just like us, an expression of life itself. Once we understand this, we will start taking better care of our world and of one another. "

― Brad Warner , There Is No God and He Is Always with You: A Search for God in Odd Places