Month: January 2014

“I want to talk about practice, different kinds of practices. We already talked about meditation a little bit. It’s probably good to have maybe three or four practices in your pocket, so to speak, that you can use.

Prayer, for example, is really a form of meditation. All spiritual practice is a form of meditation practice. I mention at the beginning of Chapter Seven in Ten Paths that meditation and meditation practice are not the same thing and that in colloquial speech it’s okay to blur it a little bit. But it is an important distinction.

The truth is really I am meditation. Who I am is that conscious relationship with what is, and that’s true, in essence, for everyone. Practice is dipping into that and being that, touching into that in a way that reminds us who we are.”

– James Wood, Meditation is What I Am

“All human suffering arises from the thought, ‘This shouldn’t be happening.'”

– James Wood

“It is good to meet here now, as human beings here on earth to explore a very interesting question and that interesting question is, ‘What on earth am I doing here on earth?’ Have you ever asked yourself that or have we been caught up in the excitement of life, with all the moneymaking and the human contacts and the machinery of life? Have we been so overwhelmed by that that we’ve forgotten something tremendously important?

Again, the question, ‘What am I doing here on this earth as an individual human being’ and hopefully it will occur to us after awhile, that just maybe our purpose here on this globe isn’t to come into it and just be frightened, just be bewildered, just be walking in a fog through all our days. Maybe a question mark will appear in our mind and we’ll say to ourselves, ‘Is it possible that there is something higher here in this world than this mad chasing around that I do and everyone else does?'”

– Vernon Howard, Vernon Howard’s Positive Answers