"Your job is to render them independent; to teach them as quickly and completely as possible how to get along without you. For you are no blessing to them so long as they need you to survive, but bless them truly only in the moment they realize you are unnecessary. In the same sense, God's greatest moment is the moment you realize you need no God."
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"If there were such a thing as sin this would be it: to allow yourself to become what you are because of the experience of others. This is the "sin" you have committed. All of you. You do not await your own experience, you accept the experience of others as gospel (literally), and then, when you encounter the actual experience for the first time, you overlay what you think you already know onto the encounter.
If you did not do this, you might have a wholly different experience-one that might render your original teacher or source wrong. In most cases, you don't want to make your parents, your schools, your religions, your traditions, your holy scriptures wrong-so you deny your own experience in the favor of what you have been told to think."
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"Here is the paradox of all human relationships: You have no need for a particular other in order for you to experience, fully Who You Are, and...without another, you are nothing.
This is both the mystery and the wonder, the frustration and the joy of the human experience. It requires deep understanding and total willingness to live within this paradox in a way which makes sense."
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"It is very romantic to say that now that your special other has entered your life, you feel complete. Yet the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness."
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"When human love relationships fail, (relationships never truly fail, except in the strictly human sense that they did not produce what you want), they fail fail because they were entered into for the wrong reason.
("Wrong," of course, is a relative term, meaning something measure against that which is "right"-whatever that is! It would be more accurate in your language to say "relations fail-change-most often when they are entered into for reasons not wholly beneficial or conducive to their survival.")"
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"You were told from your earliest days that you're "bad". You accept that you were born in "sin". Feeling guilty is a learned response. You've been told to feel guilty about yourself for things you did before you could even do anything. You have been taught to feel shame for being born less than perfect.
This alleged stated of imperfection in which you are said to have come into this world is what your religionists have the gall to call original sin. And it is original sin-but not yours. It is the first sin to be perpetrated upon your by a world which which knows nothing of God if it thinks that God would-or could-create anything imperfect.
Some of your religions have built up whole theologies around this misconception. And that is what it is, literally: a misconception. For anything I conceive-all that to which I give life-is perfect; a perfect reflection of perfection itself, made in the image and likeness of Me.
Yet, in order to justify the idea of a punitive God, your religions needed to create something of me to be angry about. So that even those people who lead exemplary lives somehow need to be saved. If they don't need to be saved from themselves, then they need to be saved from their own built in imperfection. So (these religions say) you'd better do something about of this-and fast-or you'll go straight to hell.
This, in the end, may do nothing to mollify a weird, vindictive, angry God, but it does give life to weird, vindictive, angry religions. This do religions perpetuate themselves. Thus does power remain concentrated in the hands of the few, rather than experienced through the hands of many.
Of course you choose constantly the lesser though, the smaller idea, the tiniest concept of yourself and your power, to say nothing of Me and Mine. You've been taught to."