Author

As we move into the 21st century, there's what the Bible calls a 'quickening of the spirit.'

A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.

There's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Qur'an, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bible, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bhaghavad Gita, or of the Book of Mormon, or of the other sacred texts of many of those religions.

And we're seeing a higher level of consciousness and many more opportunities for people to challenge their present ways of thinking and move into a grander and larger experience of who they really are.

Because our choices are largely based on survival. But if life is eternal, life is not a question.

I think the new spirituality will be a spirituality that's not based on a particular dogma. And that steps away from the old spiritual paradigm that we have created on this planet, which comes from a thought that there is such a thing as being better.

It graduates to 'our state is better than your state', and 'our nation is better than your nation.' And it circles all the way around to where it started: 'Our God is better than your God.'

The Roman Catholics teach that unless you're a Roman Catholic you do not go to heaven.

The sad part about our past is that religions, ironically enough, are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'

It'll become obvious that we've really been working against ourselves.

Beyond the Catholic exclusionary paradigm is a larger one which is the Christian one. Christians claim that if you don't believe in Christ, you can't get to heaven. Well that eliminates two thirds of the world's population!

Glorify who you are today, do not condemn who you were yesterday, and dream of who you can be tomorrow.

You'll find individuals agreeing on this, but when they get into collective societies and larger groups they find it difficult to achieve group agreement.

Nothing has done more to separate and divide human beings one from another than exclusivist organized religion.

We've seen in the last half century an incredible shift. This is just an extraordinary time to be alive.

I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: 'Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.

Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other.

It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.

I think that's a result of just a general increase in speed of the vibration of life itself.