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Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.

Stephen Levine

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Stephen Levine
Age: 78 †
Born: 1937
Born: July 17
Died: 2016
Died: January 17
Poet
Screenwriter
the United States of America
Stephan Levine
Fire
Brimstone
Lying
Punished
Place
Cheating
Different
Stealing
Something
Wanting
Appreciation
Somewhere
Hell

More quotes by Stephen Levine

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If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.
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I have never lived a life so much larger than death. (93)
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It is trust in our vast 'don't know' that allows room for the truth, that allows the next intuition to float to the surface.
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Nothing is more natural than grief, no emotion more common to our daily experience. It's an innate response to loss in a world where everything is impermanent.
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When the heart acknowledges how much pain there is in the mind, it turns like a mother toward a frightened child.
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Sometimes pain and illness are not meant to be removed. You can't second-guess God. Rather than praying for it to go away, it's often wiser to pray that you learn as much from it as you possibly can.
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Death is just a change in lifestyles.
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Healing is bringing mercy and Awareness into that which we have held in judgment and fear.
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It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
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In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same -- Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence.
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Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us.
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Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
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Wanting things to be otherwise is the very essence of suffering. We almost never directly experience what pain is because our reaction to it is so immediate that most of what we call pain is actually our experience of resistance to that phenomenon. And the resistance is usually a good deal more painful than the original sensation.
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Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
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The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.
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You can call it wisdom, or sanity, or health, or enlightenment. I use the word God as a short-cut. I am comfortable with the word God because I don't have the foggiest idea of what it means.
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We are so numb we don't even know what a direct experience is. We have an experience, then we think about it and we think the thinking about it is the experience.
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Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.
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The demons aren't the noise. They are our aversion to the noise...when you can accept discomfort, doing so allows a balance of mind. That surrender, that letting go of wanting anything to be other than it is right in the moment, is what frees us from hell.
Stephen Levine
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Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)
Stephen Levine