Alan A. Lew > Quotes

“Forgiveness, it has been said, means giving up our hopes for a better past.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Every soul needs to express itself. Every heart needs to crack itself open. Every one of us needs to move from anger to healing, from denial to consciousness, from boredom to renewal.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“There is a story about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. One day his older brother died, and a newspaper got the story wrong and printed Alfred’s obituary instead. Alfred opened the paper that morning and had the unusual experience of reading his obituary while he was still alive. “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday,” the obituary began. Alfred threw down the paper. That’s not how I want to be remembered, he said. That’s not what’s important to me, he said, and right then and there he decided to throw his entire fortune into rewarding people for bettering this world and bringing it closer to peace.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Love is as strong as death, and marriage, if it contains even the slightest trace of love, lasts forever.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“Spiritual practice won’t change what happens. Rather, it will help us to experience what happens not as evil, but simply as what happens.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“The Hebrew term for a calm, settled state of mind—yishuv ha-dat—is bound up with the concept of sitting. Daat is awareness or consciousness, intellectual, emotional, meditative, intuitive or all of the above. The word yishuv is a noun from the Hebrew root yashav, meaning to sit, or to dwell or to inhabit.”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

“The great journey of transformation begins with the acknowledgment that we need to make it. It is not something we are undertaking for amusement, nor even for the sake of convention; rather, it is a spiritual necessity. And our need to be more conscious—to awaken from the deep dream that has held us in its thrall—is always there”
― Alan A. Lew, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation