Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation.

I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things, too - a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values, meaning, purpose, and quality.

One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.

Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.

The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits

The Sufis say there are three ways to know fire - by hearing it described, by seeing it, or by being burned.

Modern science agrees that the universe consists of vibrations, but sound is more than vibration. Distinct from white noise, sound is vibrations in harmonic proportions, and from the billions of vibrations that are possible, the universe shows a startling, overwhelming preference for the few thousand that make harmonic sense.This is because the One, from which all things issue, is beautiful.