Achariya Fritz Kramer
Speaks on "Moral of the Story"
Sunday, February 8, 2015 at 11:00am
From time immemorial, man has placed considerable importance on codes of conduct. All societies and cultural traditions develop standards, rules, guidelines to delineate and define right action. That outward structure is mirrored within us as well, as we construct our personal moral and ethical identities. Yet, what is right, and why? Through the tool of parables, great teachers from all times and lands have answered these questions. Let us come together this Sunday to meditate on the moral of their story.
—Achariya Fritz
From the Gurus and Swamis: AUM
"Understand that God seeks not your rituals and sacrificial judgement of human behavior, but rather your compassionate wisdom and divine understanding."
—Swami Yogananda
"Every man possesses a soul. Soul, in its very nature, is pure and perfect. The perfection of the soul remains intact under all circumstances. Nothing can defile the purity of soul. A man is spiritual or non-spiritual, not because he has a spiritual or a non-spiritual soul, but according to the degree to which he has succeeded in unfolding and realizing within himself the inherent divinity of his soul."
—Swami Premananda
"Karma-Yoga is the attaining through unselfish work of that freedom which is the goal of all human nature. Every selfish action, therefore, retards our reaching the goal, and every unselfish action takes us towards the goal; that is why the only definition that can be given of morality is this: That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral."
—Swami Vivekananda
Noble Thoughts: ("Let Noble Thoughts come to us from all sides." —Rigveda)
"Ethical conduct implies something beyond ethics - prayer, faith, and trust in God. Ethics is, then, not simply a code of rules by which one learns to play social games; it aims at the complete formation of the human person. In addition to knowing the objective norms of conduct, one must also acquire a kind of intuitive sense of how to put them into practice in individual circumstances. Here ethics blends into the art of living, and becomes, in fact, the education of human love."
—Thomas Merton, "Love and Living"
"If our mirror is not clean, we can never see the true reality of things and people, because we find everywhere the reflection of our own desires or fears, the echo of our own turmoil...In order to see, it is obvious that we have to stop being in the middle of the picture. Therefore the seeker will discriminate between the things that tend to blur his vision and those that clarify it; such essentially will be his 'morality'."
—Satprem, "Sri Aurobindo, or the Adventure of Consciousness"
"The highest morality is universal. We should render devoted service to the world in every possible way, remembering that every one of our brethren has a claim on us...Mankind is one, seeing that all are equally subject to the Moral Law. All men are equal in God's eyes."
—M. K. Gandhi, "Ethical Religion"