“Sacrifices and offerings are a dramatic way of proclaiming that they are not the ultimate possessors of their life and also of articulating their determination to live duty-oriented lives and not desire-oriented lives.”

–Professor Antony Fernando of Sri Lanka

“We found out that matter is not existent.  At the beginning, there is only something which changes.  How can something which is in-between create something which can be grasped? … We are part of the same organism which we cannot talk about.  If I explain it, try to catch it with language, I destroy it.  The Creation and the Creator cannot be seen as separate.  There is only oneness.”

–Physicist Hans-Peter Dürr

“A great spirit, supporting the world and the weather and all life on earth, a spirit so light that [what it says] to mankind is not through common words, but by storm and snow and rain and the fury of the sea; all the forces of nature that men fear.  But Sila has also another way of [communicating]:  by sunlight and calm of the sea, and little children innocently at lay, themselves understanding nothing. .  . . When all is well, Sila sends no message to mankind, but withdraws into endless nothingness, apart.”

–Inuit spiritual adept

“[God is] a beingless being, a dimensionless point, an infinite container of everything, including itself.”

–Psychologist Clyde Ford

“Life is holiness and every day humdrum, sadness and laughter, the mind and the belly all mixed together.  The Great Spirit doesn’t want su to sort them out neatly.”

–Leonard Crow Dog, Lakota medicine man

“The Cheyenne Nation of the North American plains is believed to have been established by its visionary hero, Sweet Medicine, in the 1700s.  One of its salient features is a council of forty-four men chosen from various groups in the Cheyenne family to be peace chiefs.  When they join the council, the peace chiefs are to make a complete break with their past, in which they might have been warriors, and give up violence as a means of settling disputes.  Instead, they have been instructed by Sweet Medicine that, if there are any fights, “You are to do nothing but take your pipe and smoke.”  The chiefs meet to arbitrate disputes by smoking the peace pipe together; the goal is to smoke the pipe with their enemies.  The chiefs’ homes also become places of refuge, for they are to help the people however they can.  At a community meal, they are the last to be fed.”

–“Living Religions” by Mary Pat Fisher (ninth edition)