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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
Something
Wanting
Appreciation
Somewhere
Hell
Fire
Brimstone
Lying
Punished
Place
Cheating
Different
Stealing

More quotes by Stephen Levine

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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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If you can find the God inside yourself, you can find the God inside everybody.
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Much thought has at its root a dissatisfaction with what is. Wanting is the urge for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. When there is wanting in the mind, that moment feels incomplete. Wanting is seeing elsewhere. Completeness is being right here.
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Gratitude is the state of mind of thankfulness. As it is cultivated, we experience an increase in our sympathetic joy, our happiness at another's happiness. Just as in the cultivation of compassion, we may feel the pain of others, so we may begin to feel their joy as well. And it doesn't stop there.
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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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Understanding is the ultimate seduction of the mind. Go to the truth beyond the mind.
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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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Letting go of our suffering is the hardest work we will ever do. It is also the most fruitful. To heal means to meet ourselves in a new way -- in the newness of each moment where all is possible and nothing is limited to the old.
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Letting the last breath come. Letting the last breath go. Dissolving, dissolving into vast space, the light body released from its heavier form. A sense of connectedness with all that is, all sense of separation dissolved in the vastness of being. Each breath melting into space as though it were the last.
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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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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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Forgiveness is mental floss! Build the capacity to forgive slowly - start with little unkind acts, otherwise you'll sabotage yourself. When we forgive, we forgive the actor, not the action.
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It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!
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The mind creates the abyss. The heart crosses over it. Love is the bridge.
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[D]etachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be. (95)
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When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.
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Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)
Stephen Levine
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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.
Stephen Levine
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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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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.
Stephen Levine