Prison Quotes

"True renunciation is not giving up worldly things. It is giving up ideas. They are the bars on your prison."

Bondage

“What is worth protecting if it denies you your freedom? What is worth having if it binds you and bonds you to the past? Who is worth being with if all that they can do is remind you that you are weak and pathetic and unable to follow what you know? These are all valid questions. The impediments to freedom are still greatly valued, and freedom is looked at with anxiety and uncertainty. Your prison cell door is open and has been all along. But are you willing to venture out of the seeming security of your bondage?”

The Body as Prison

"If you think that your vehicle is your self, you will hate the vehicle because it will seem to trap you and you will feel imprisoned, bound and limited by it."

"People only love their bodies when they serve a higher purpose.To love your body for any other reason is simply to use it for selfish reasons, which will breed resentment.Your body must enable you to extend your sense of relationship in life. If it does not do this, it is a prison."

"If you do not know your purpose or your greater reality, then you will think of your body as a prison and you will exercise your self-abuse by misusing your body. It will then become an image of your self-neglect or self-abuse."

The Prison of the Mind

"What keeps people from being free is not their external circumstances. It is their own mind and their own thoughts.They are prisoners to their thoughts."

"When people are dominated by their thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, when these represent the prison bars that prevent their free access to life, they often want to do away with it all. They do not want to think of the future, and they do not want to think of the past. They say, 'Well, the past is over and the future doesn’t exist. There is only now.'"

"Without a greater authority in your life, this is what the mind will do. It will calcify and become hard and brittle. It will become impenetrable and impermeable, something that defends its point of view without any regard to reality or to changes in circumstances. This imperils you and imprisons you. This denies you and isolates you. This prevents you from having access to others and learning from them. This denies your gift and your ability to receive the gifts of others."

"Most of the miseries that confound and imprison the human mind are escaped as one advances in The Way of Knowledge, but not all suffering is escaped. Life continues to be difficult and problematic. Your body has its aches and pains. Your mind has its problems and troubling thoughts, feelings and experience, but they do not dominate your attention now, and as you advance they cannot hold you back or limit your experience."

"If you attempt to make others conform to your ideas, you will attempt to imprison them, and you will be a prisoner along with them."

"People have such strong and fixed beliefs because underneath this they are afraid and confused. The more afraid and confused, the more they attach themselves to their ideas or to their associations in life with dogged and stupid perseverance. They cannot see beyond the prison house they have created for themselves. They have locked themselves indoors. They cannot see the sunrise. They cannot see the mystery of their life."

Imprisoned in Individuality

"You are taking a great journey from being imprisoned in your individuality to using it to express a Greater Reality."

"For what value is there in individuality except in the fact that you have individual gifts to give? Beyond this, individuality becomes your personal prison cell, a place where you can live but cannot escape."

The Doorway Out

"People ask,'How can I rid myself of these terrible judgments? I see I have these judgments.They are binding me, imprisoning me, weighing upon me.They torment me. How can I get rid of them?' Well, you cannot get rid of them where you are, but you can do something else in life where they are not necessary, and then they begin to evaporate. God has a Plan and how the Plan works is that it gives you something meaningful to do in life."

"The door to your prison cell is open. You can push it open at any time. You can walk out into the light of day. For this to happen, however, you must be willing to have a different experience of yourself and a different determination within you. You must be open and desiring of a greater life—a life that is not in keeping with your past and that will bring you out of the confinement of living within your personal mind. As a result of this escape, even your personal mind will be refreshed, renewed and restored, for your personal mind’s greater purpose is to serve Knowledge."

"In the state of interdependence, you are able to give and receive in a truly meaningful way. Here devotion is possible because from a position of responsible decision making, you can give your life to something. Gaining the ability to do this represents the real value and purpose of independence. Without this, your independence will only isolate you further and further within your own mind and your own thoughts. It will become a great prison house from which the possibility of escape will seem increasingly difficult and remote."

"The answer to your prayers is a preparation, a way out, a ladder with steps. Your Spiritual Family must get you out of the hole of your own thinking. They must open the doors to your mind and open the windows so you can see out and so the communication can come in. They must bring you out of the prison of your own thoughts and conditioning and back into life as it is. Then the mind reorients itself and becomes reassociated with life. It then re-establishes a genuine hierarchy in its relationship with the Spirit and with the body."

"Because you were meant to serve the world, the world calls it out of you. But you must be in a position to respond. If your life is completely caught up in what you have created for yourself, you are bound by circumstances and obligations and expectations and relationships. If your life is in disarray. If the Four Pillars of your life have never been built or established, you cannot respond to a greater calling. You do not have the power to do it. You do not have the freedom to do it. You do not have the self-trust to do it. You may feel it and it may shake you to the soul, but you are imprisoned in a life that you have allowed to be built up around you or that you have actively established yourself."

The Risk of Imprisonment

"For once you lose your integrity and your freedom, it is very difficult to regain them. Very difficult. Even when people have sacrificed their integrity for relationships or for money or for advantage, even under these more normal circumstances, it is very difficult to regain it. You have to mount tremendous effort and take risks. It is easier, then, to stay out of trouble than it is to get out. You do not want to become a prisoner in your own world. You do not want to become a prisoner in your own mind. You do not want to become a prisoner to anyone or anything else."

"Do you wish to give over the authority of your life and have your life and circumstances completely controlled for a mere promise of greater technology or a promise of peace and equanimity in the world? There is peace in the prison because everyone is controlled. But is this really peace? Or is this simply the restraint of war?"

See also

"Prison planet"

Further study

• The Journey to a New Life, Chapter 3: The Prison

• Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 13: What Must Be Unlearned?

• Healing Relationships (September 9, 2008)