Spirit Centered

The great question, you see, is whether or not this world is really real. If it is, then those who would search for some higher reality are mistaken. If this world is illusory — but a screen for some higher order of being — then there is more to reality than meets the eye. And we have settled for some illusory treasure and given up searching for the king.

Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every mystery points to a higher reality. A reality overarching and infusing this world with splendor. One pulsing through its veins. Unnoticed and unnamed. Of the Nameless One. A holiness so holy that it fills even our every day illusions with spiritual meaning.
— Lawrence Kushner, Honey From the Rock: Visions of Jewish Mystical Renewal, p. 34.

There are two directions of astonishment. Here is how it happens. Above there arches the immensity of the heavens. That if the thickness of this page of paper were to equal the 93 million miles between the earth and the sun then the distance to the edge of the known universe would be a stack of papers 31 million miles high.

And within there breaths the intricacy of the human body. That in each of the 100 trillion cells there are roughly 100,000 genes coiled on a molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid which if uncoiled and unwound would string back and forth between the earth and the sun over 400 times.

Man stands at the center of these two infinite directions. Above him space and time are literally astronomic. Within him space and time are infinitesimal. And now we understand that the universe is expanding. Growing ever larger. And that with each new microscope the inner biology grows ever smaller. In a word: we will never see the farthest thing above nor the smallest thing within. The greatness of the distance and the minuteness of the size will always increase simultaneously. It is almost as if we were driven to maintain this balance that always leaves us in the center.
— Lawrence Kushner, Ibid, p. 117.

     The Church had departed from the simple, direct, and inspiring story of how our Lord came upon earth clothed in visibility and dwelt as a man among men. For the marvelous reality, the clergy substituted fantasies that entangled them in metaphysical webs from which they could not extricate themselves. The beautiful truth of the Divine Humanity became distorted, dissociated, dissected beyond recognition, and our Lord Himself was lost in deadly dialectics. Swedenborg brought together the scattered and broken parts, gave them normal shape and meaning, and thus established a "new communion with God in Christ." Swedenborg was not a destroyer, but a divinely inspired interpreter. He was a prophet sent by God. His own message proclaims it more convincingly than any saying of his followers could. There is no escaping his virile personality. As we read his message, we are filled with recognition and delight. He did not make a new Bible, but he made the Bible all new! One who receives him gains a great spiritual possession.
     The first and last thought of Swedenborg throughout his writings is to show that in the Bible, rightly read and interpreted, is to be found the truest and noblest conception of God possible. Most human minds are so constituted that there is in them a secret chamber where theological subjects are stored, and its centre is the idea of God....
— Helen Keller, My Religion, pp. 71-72.

     I cannot imagine myself without religion. I could as easily fancy a living body without a heart. To one who is deaf and blind, the spiritual world offers no difficulty. Nearly everything in the natural world is as vague, as remote from my senses as spiritual things seem to the minds of most people. I plunge my hands deep into my Braille volumes containing Swedenborg's teachings, and withdraw them full of the secrets of the spiritual world. The inner, or "Mystic," sense, if you like, gives me vision of the unseen. My mystic world is lovely with trees and clouds and stars and eddying streams I have never "seen." I am often conscious of beautiful flowers and birds and laughing children where to my seeing associates there is nothing. They skeptically declare that I see "light that never was on sea or land." But I know that their mystic sense is dormant, and that is why there are so many barren places in their lives. They prefer "facts" to vision. They want a scientific demonstration and they can have it. Science with untiring patience traces man back to the ape, and rests content. It is out of this ape that God creates the seer, and science meets spirit as life meets death, and life and death are one.
— Helen Keller, Ibid., p. 157.