Worship

"You must come back to what is essential, to what is real. The temple, the mosque, the church and the tribal place of worship are the places to honor the Mystery and to evoke the Presence and the Power."

God "is not a God that needs praise and worship, that must have obedience and adulation."

Directives

"In your" ... "meditation practices enter your periods of silence with great reverence and devotion. These are your times of worship."

Worship and work

"You may pray to God. You may fall down on your knees and prostrate yourself in the temple or the mosque or the church. But until you begin to carry out God’s work that is meant for you to carry out you will not understand the real nature of your spiritual reality."

"God wills that your true power and abilities be restored to you and that this restoration happen within your engagement with Knowledge deep within yourself and your engagement with others within the world. If you value your relationship with the Creator, then this is what you must respond to. Prostrating yourself, worshipping, declaring your submission mean nothing if you will not follow that which you are meant to see, know and do."

"It is not enough to believe in God or to worship God. For if you cannot follow what God has given you to follow, if you cannot follow the deeper Knowledge that God has placed within you to guide you, then your prayers and your prostration really are not authentic."

Not universal

"Worshipping a Greater Power or a greater force or identity in life is not an emphasis that is shared by all intelligent life, even within the vicinity of your world."

Hero worship

"There are many spiritual communities that are not spiritual communities. They are simply an environment where one person is worshipped, and everyone else is subservient. You are aware of the examples of this. That is because people are fixated on hero worship and do not know how to join with each other meaningfully. As much as people may hate the idea of having heroes and heroines because of the great disability that it promotes for everyone else, they still long to have a hero or heroine nonetheless, someone who is beyond the mundane difficulties and human failures that they see all around them."

"It is not enough to celebrate a great Teacher’s revelation if you cannot find access to your own. It is not enough to worship a great teacher or emancipator unless you can find this power and this presence within your life, which will apply itself in far more mundane and simple day-to-day circumstances."

God's messengers

"Devotion is seen as a sign of weakness in a society that worships heroes and heroines. Consider the religions of your world, for example. Many people are more comfortable idealizing Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad than they are in really involving themselves in the teachings of these traditions. The hero worship takes the place of their own personal work and endeavor, and so these teachers become idols of worship. This is common, and you can see it all around you. Look at how people are idolized in your athletic events, in your cinema. Everyone is looking for someone to believe in as if believing in someone provides real hope and impetus for change. So it is a curious thing that while people are terrified to give themselves to anything, they would worship other people without a second thought. Worshipping and idealizing others is not the same as joining them. In fact, you place them above yourself where they are out of reach."

"Would you want to go share a household with Buddha or Jesus? It would make you very uncomfortable! The problem with people like that is you cannot stand to have them alive around you, but you cannot forget them either. So, you prefer to worship them after they’re gone. They are rarely tolerated in their own lives, except by very few people."

"You see, historically people always want to make the messenger of God the object—after they kill him, of course. They worship the person because it is easier to deal with a person than with God. It is easier to worship Jesus on the cross than God."