Steve Taylor > Quotes

“To use a medical analogy, while mystics try to heal themselves (that is, to transcend sleep), conventionally religious people simply try to manage the symptoms. Near-death”
― Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening

“Mystics from all traditions have the common aim of cultivating wakefulness, while the common aim of all mainstream religions is to offer consolation and psychological support. To use a medical analogy, while mystics try to heal themselves (that is, to transcend sleep), conventionally religious people simply try to manage the symptoms. Near-death”
― Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening

“We will only be able to live in harmony with our planet, other species and with each other when we are able to live in harmony with ourselves.”
― Steve Taylor, Back to Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds

“The Christian Church has put a spiritual hierarchy on jobs. Ministers and missionaries are on top, then perhaps doctors and nurses come next, and so on to the bottom, where artists appear. Artists of whatever kind have to compromise everything to entertain. Art is fluffy froth that is no good in the Kingdom of God. What nonsense.”
― Steve Taylor

“The Core It can take a whole lifetime to become yourself — years of feeling adrift and alone acting in a role you were never meant to play stammering in a language you weren’t meant to speak wearing clothes that don’t fit trying to pass yourself off as normal but always feeling clumsy and unnatural like a stranger pretending to be at home knowing that everyone can sense your strangeness and resents you because they know you don’t belong. But slowly, through years of exploration, you see landmarks that you recognize hear vague whispers that seem to make sense strangely familiar words, as if you had spoken them yourself, and ideas that resonate deep down, as if you already knew them. And slowly your confidence grows and you walk faster, sensing the right direction, feeling the magnetic pull of home. And now you begin to excavate to peel away the layers of conditioning to shed the skins of your flimsy false self to discard those habits and desires that you absorbed until you reach the solid rock beneath the shining molten core of you. And now there’s no more uncertainty — your path is clear, your course is fixed. This bedrock of your being is so firm and stable that there’s no need for acceptance no fear of exclusion or ridicule. Everything you do is right and true deep and whole with authenticity. But don’t stop. This is only the halfway point — maybe even just the beginning. Once you’ve reached the core keep exploring but more subtly keep excavating but more delicately and you’ll keep unearthing new layers, finding new depths, until you reach the point that is no point where the core dissolves and the solid rock melts like ice and the self loses its boundary and expands to encompass the whole. A self even stronger and truer because it’s no self at all. A self you had to find so that you could lose it.”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“Consciousness doesn't emerge from matter because it has always been in matter. Consciousness is a fundamental quality that exists everywhere and in everything.”
― Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

“Tell yourself that this is the place you’re meant to be, at least for now. Let your present situation be your entire world, at least for now. Then you’ll sense something far better than the discord of endless desires: the ease and grace of acceptance and the joy of truly being where you are.”
― Steve Taylor, The Clear Light: Spiritual Reflections and Meditations

“Some indigenous peoples feel that they share their identity with natural phenomena, and as a result they feel that by hurting the natural world they are hurting themselves. However, we feel that the natural world is "other" to us; we can't empathize with it, and so don't have any qualms about abusing it.”
― Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

“Men tend to stress autonomy and fear relationship, women tend to stress relationship and fear autonomy. 3”
― Steve Taylor, The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era

“The goal of human life is to realize this oneness, and so to transcend separation, fear and even death.”
― Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

“Don’t desire anything except the end of desire.”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“The conventional materialist mode has very serious consequences in terms of how we live our lives, and how we treat other species and the natural world. It leads to a devaluation of life—of our own lives, of other species' and the Earth itself..a spiritual worldview can change our relationship to the world. It can engender a reverential attitude to nature, and to life itself. It can heal us, just as it can heal the whole world.”
― Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

“The harder you search for happiness turning the world upside down for a legendary treasure that was never there the more you lose touch with the shining source of peace and joy inside you.”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“Where there is spirituality there is freedom, but religion is rigid. To be spiritual you have to step aside from the belief and go more into knowing, which gives you a greater freedom, including the freedom to question. Unless you question you're not going to get past the beliefs.”
― Steve Taylor, Not I, Not other than I: The Life And Teachings Of Russel Williams

“Attention is an alchemy that turns dullness to beauty and anxiety to ease.”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“Desire is like a fertilized cell that forever splits and multiplies and never reaches a final form only disperses and dilutes your mind and takes you even further away from the source.”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“Men tend to stress autonomy and fear relationship, women tend to stress relationship and fear autonomy.”
― Steve Taylor, The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era

“Just for a moment let your mind be quiet and see how fears evaporate see how desires withdraw like the claws of an animal that’s no longer threatened.”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“How will you know how strong you are unless your strength is tested?”
― Steve Taylor, The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

“Bliss is the nature of spirit-force in the same way that wetness is a quality of water.”
― Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

“So as evolution progresses, consciousness becomes more involved in matter: living beings become a fuller expression of spirit and move closer to the source from which they, and all things, came.”
― Steve Taylor, Spiritual Science: Why Science Needs Spirituality to Make Sense of the World

“talking”
― Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening

“When Man invented fire, he didn't say "Hey, let's cook!" He said: "Great! Now we can see naked bottoms in the dark!”
― Steve Taylor

“Discontent is caused by not having what you think you want.”
― Steve Taylor, Out of the Darkness: From Turmoil to Transformation

“confinement. We can communicate with”
― Steve Taylor, The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era