The idea that an individual can find God is terribly self-centered. It is like a wave thinking it can find the sea.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the notion of individualism in spirituality, suggesting that true understanding is communal and universal.
John Templeton's quote emphasizes the inherent interconnectedness of all existence, suggesting that the search for God as a solitary pursuit is misguided. Just as a wave is fundamentally part of the ocean, individuals are part of a larger spiritual reality, and the quest for understanding should transcend self-centered desires for personal enlightenment.
In practice
During a discussion on spirituality at a community gathering.
The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be. It's self centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity.
Life is made up not necessarily of great sacrifices or high-level duties but of little things. The smiles, the kindnesses, the commitments and obligations and responsibilities that are given habitually and lovingly are the blessings that win and preserve the heart and bring comfort to one's self as we as to others. This is the ministry of service performed by every useful life.
The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be.
The objective of our religious foundations is to teach people that they are hurting themselves when they say they believe something. What we should realize is we know almost nothing about God and therefore we should be eager to search and to learn.
Three of my children are medical doctors; they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew, but they don't know much more about soul than he did.
I focus on spiritual wealth now, and I'm busier, more enthusiastic, and more joyful than I have ever been.
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
The incentive to peacemaking is love, but it degenerates into appeasement whenever justice is ignored. To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises. All authentic Christian peacemaking exhibits the love and justice-and so the pain-of the cross.
All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence.
Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.
You can't just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.
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