Geniuses Are Not Always Pleasant People.

Religions Have Found That If You Behave In A Certain Way, If You Sort Of Perform Certain Rituals That Expand Your Mind And Make You Realize That Will Make You Realize And Help You To Seguey Into Transcendence And Perform Certain Acts, Adopt A Certain Lifestyle, You Develop New Capacities Of Mind And Heart, Just Like The Dancer, Or The Athlete That Make You Into A Whole Human Being And Principle After One Of These Disciplines Right Across The Board In All Of The Faiths Is Compassion, The Ability To Feel With The Other Person.

After A Time I Found That I Could Almost Listen To The Silence, Which Had A Dimension All Of Its Own. I Started To Attend To Its Strange And Beautiful Texture, Which Of Course, It Was Impossible To Express In Words. I Discovered That I Felt At Home And Alive In The Silence, Which Compelled Me To Enter My Interior World And Around There. Without The Distraction Of Constant Conversation, The Words On The Page Began To Speak Directly To My Inner Self. They Were No Long Expressing Ideas That Were Simply Interesting Intellectually, But Were Talking Directly To My Own Yearning And Perplexity.

Even Though The Discples Were Not Aware Of It, The Presence Was With Them While They Were Reviewing The Scriptures Together On The Road. Henceforth, We Will Catch Only A Fleeting Glimpse Of It -- In The Study Of Sacred Writings, In Other Human Beings, In Liturgy, And In Communion With Strangers. But These Moments Remain Us That Our Fellow Men And Women Are Themselves Sacred; There Is Something About Them Taht Is Worthy Of Absolute Reverence, Is In The Last Resort Mysterious, And We Will Always Elude Us.

Every Single One Of The Major World Faiths, Whether We're Talking About Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Darwinism, Judaism, Christianity And Islam, Have All Come To The Conclusion That What Holds Us Back From Our Better Self Is Ego, Selfishness, Greed, Unkindness, Hatred. And It All Springs From A Sense Of Thwarted Ego.

I Left The Convent And That Was Because I Wasn't A Very Good Nun. I Could See That I Wasn't Going To Make It. It's Very Difficult To Be A Nun, Or To Live A Religious Life. It's Very Difficult To Live A Life Of Total Celibacy Or A Life Without Any Possessions Or Material Responsibilities At All, Or In Total Obedience To Somebody Else, And Remain A Mature Whole Human Being, And I Knew That I Wasn't Going To Be One Of Those.