All quotes from
Alberto's book
Once you make your vows of love, you may never go back to your old
ways. The price you pay for doing so is
death – whether the loss of your life or of a relationship you were not fully
ready to commit to.
Genuine
power lies in the ability to practice peace when confronted by someone else’s
fury.
When
we give in to anger we continue to foster the situations that feed the rage.
Peace may cost you, but it’s the price of war that bankrupts the
soul.
We don’t have to live in a world of competition, accumulation, and
scorekeeping.
A creator doesn’t crush opponents.
It’s our purity of intent that attracts emotionally healthy
partners. To practice purity of intent
is to have a willingness to trust, and to enter partnership with truthfulness
and curiosity.
We all love to be on the inside track of the latest bit of gossip,
but be mindful: even listening to gossip
is participating in an act of violence against the person you are hearing about.
When you practice temperance, you don’t squander your energy – or
overload your credit card. You find
creative and more sustainable ways to operate.
You recognize when the party has stopped being fun and turned ugly.
Humility conquers pride. The two extremes of self-absorption – too
much focus on your individuality and lack of self-awareness – disappear.
In the rite of marriage, integrating your old single self with your
new partnered self and taking the plunge into deep intimacy are the tests you
face.
If you see that you’re an essential, indispensable part of creation,
you understand that you’re responsible for creating your experience in this
life.
Wishing for world peace is no excuse for being inconsiderate to your
neighbours.
If you resist initiation, the universe will conspire to bring you
face to face with the end of a stage in your life in some other way. Resistance is futile.
We discover that although it is very difficult to change the world,
it is not difficult to change our own world.
Life will drag us kicking and screaming to our destiny if we try to
escape it. Our choice is to be delivered in grace and beauty, which happens
when we say yes to our initiation.
To understand the role of emotions, it’s useful to distinguish them
from feelings. When someone cuts in
front of you on the highway, you get upset at that driver. Your spontaneous reaction of anger is a
feeling that passes because your nervous system resets itself. … Feelings are
authentic. By contrast, emotions are
like viruses infecting our primitive neurocomputer. If you’re still angry days or years after an
upsetting incident, what you are experiencing isn’t a feeling but an emotion
stored in your neural network. You
rationalize this emotion, and you come to believe, for example, that your
spiteful behaviour toward your boss is justified and feel you have a right to
be angry and wrathful.
You are the author of the dream or nightmare you are living.
In higher organisms, evolution favors the most cooperative.
Humans as a species have yet to discover what bees know: that
survival of the individual depends on the well-being of the hive.
Paradise is a brain state, not a place.
Make peace a conscious choice.
The only person who can serve as your programmer is you. But first you must change the notion of God
as the ultimate rescuer who can be wooed, appeased, and coaxed into saving you
from suffering. In fact, you must drop
the notion of God altogether, because it is a uniquely human creation.
The shaman recognizes that like everyone, she has a spark of the
Divine but is not the fire itself.
We find the courage to be generous when we know that if there seems
to be a shortage of something in our lives – whether money, love or time – it’s
our perception that’s flawed.
The human brain is made up of four anatomically different
subcomputers that developed over millions of years of evolution.
Once you free yourself from your primitive brain’s limited
perceptions of what you can accomplish, you discover your greatness. You realize that you’re both an immaterial
speck and an all-important element of the universe.
We think that we’re much too valuable to have our identity and all
that we’ve worked for swept away.
