The Divine Beyond and Within

Below are some quotes taken from this dialogue:

Roman:

"The ones who last in monastic life are committed to their prayer life. The core of the thing has to be the monk's own commitment to their personal relationship with the divine."

"When you're modulating the electrical signals these cells are sending to one another, in some sense, you're turning the dial of their imagination."

"For me as a little cell, I need to be worried about interpreting my electrical signals... making sure I'm looking for the vision or the spirit behind each electrical signal."

"The overall effect of 'you are God' is an amplification of narcissism... the people who stabilize that sense, who it doesn't do that to, it's because they're sitting completely still in a quiet place."

"I feel like I have an alternate version of myself that's living at Mount Athos... trying to find my version of monasticism in the place that has fallen furthest from that search."

Matt:

"God could be perfect if God was just the One, but still incomplete... to be fully complete means entering into a relationship and not being totally in control of everything."

"Each cell type has its own ritual performance that maintains our organism... I am the monotheistic religion of my cells."

“The human being seems to be at the nexus of this cosmic process, in the middle of it, and so having a vantage point on the whole in a way that might not be available either at levels below us or perhaps even levels above us.”

"What is prayer... it seems like it's analogous to a kind of attempt to tune ourselves to that larger field, to be in sync with... the theoelectric field that shapes our collective humanity."

"Church should be... like you and people you're close to in your community meeting in someone's living room every Sunday morning and talking to each other about what you think all these ideas mean."

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