Quotes about Progress

You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.

Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half-good to rebel against.

New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.

No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.

God has no grandchildren. God only has children," as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.

This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

working hypothesis, can move forward with theory, while

We don't think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.