Maybe, as in that old children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, “real” is not where you start out but where you wind up; you become real gradually when somebody loves you for a long, long time.

Conscious labor is basically any intentional effort that moves against the grain of entropy, i.e., against that pervasive tendency of human consciousness to slip into autopilot.

Jesus’s admonition to be “in this world but not of it.”

since we are dealing with a realm that is causally dominant with respect to our own, a higher level of precision and tighter tolerances must necessarily pertain. Coloring outside the lines is permitted under the Law of Accident; not so under the Law of Fate. Higher standards across the board are required in consistency, obedience, clarity,

when all the intellectual abstractions have been stripped away, and it is allowed to speak in its own native tongue, what it speaks of, with surprising simplicity and directness, is beauty, hope, and a mysteriously deeper order of coherence and aliveness flowing through this earthly terrain connecting it to the infinite wellsprings of cosmic

Christianity is fundamentally all about the exchange between the realms, and the Eucharist is one of the central channels through which this exchange flows.

We will either make the leap to the next level of conscious evolution—the so-called “integral” level or capacity to think from the whole—or we will wipe out a good part of a planetary legacy millions of years in the making and in the process put the entire Ray of Creation at risk.

it sits on the dividing line between the visible and invisible worlds—or,

What does it mean to let go of all that has carried one in one’s life? What lies on the other side of such a vast and reckless self-donation?