I'm not going through it very quickly because the class I'm taking is kicking my butt, but what I have read has given me much to think about. And that's a good thing. Deepak Chopra makes it an easy read but gives you a lot to contemplate.
Favorite quote so far:
"You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible."
I looked and looked and for the life of me I could never find that place. So I decided to build it from scratch.
Second favorite quote:
"'In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.' (Matthew 7:9-12)
If you contemplate the Golden Rule, it turns out to be an injunction to live by grace rather than by what you think other people deserve."
Usually, when we think of the Golden Rule, we think in terms of a proactive situation; we treat someone nice so they'll be nice to us in return. But Deepak Chopra is looking at it from a reactive situation; someone has just been thoughtless/rude/mean to us and in our anger we want to give them what they deserve, or at the very least turn away, but Grace requires us to be nice, as if they'd been nice. This goes back to treating people as they ought to be, rather than as they are.
I apologize to my non-Christian friends for quoting scripture at you. I'm trying to be more spiritual than religious. Despite the fact that many have used Scripture to beat us up and leave us to die tied to a fence, there is some spiritual wisdom in scripture. And that's Deepak Chopra's intent in writing this book; to look beyond Jesus "the man" whose factual history has been all but lost and to bypass Jesus "the arbitrator of rules" who has been kidnapped by the conservative false prophets, and look at the spriritual, mystical leader he was trying to be all along.
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