Mankind’s Greatest Prayer
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Silence and solitude are universally recognized spiritual practices, and there are good reasons for this. Learning how to discipline your speech is a way of preventing your energies from spilling out of you through the rupture of your mouth, exhausting you and filling the world with words, words, words instead of serenity, peace and bliss.
– Elizabeth Gilbert –
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Perhaps the individual is so viable a god because he can actually understand the ceremonial significance of the way he is treated, and quite on his own can respond dramatically to what is proffered him. In contacts between such deities there is no need for middlemen; each of these gods is able to serve as his own priest.
– Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior –
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Kindness, not rituals, is mankind’s greatest prayer.
– Debasish Mridha –