Pray

I've just finished reading the Pray part of the book Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was both entertaining and educational. I enjoyed it. What I want to do now is share some of my favorite quotes.

"The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: 'Desire is the design flaw.')"

"I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?' Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering."

"The Lakota Sioux says that a child who cannot sit still is a half-developed child."

"God dwells within you, as you. AS you. If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that encapsulates it. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn't interested in watching you enact some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves."