“21 Things I Did, Exploring Spirituality Beyond Institutional Religion:

1. I made peace with my religious past.
2. I took responsibility for my spiritual journey.
3. I stopped dividing up the world into “sacred” and “secular.”
4. I began listening to and trusting my inner voice.
5. I started looking past the externals, and relating to the deepest reality I knew was present in every human being.
6. I quit making my humanity the enemy.
7. I resisted the need to build a persona around being an enlightened person.
8. I opened myself to the rhythm and flow of life in nature.
9. I explored what the natural sciences have to say about the universe and my humanness.
10. I focused on addressing the root of my suffering.
11. I paid attention to my deepest desires and passions.
12. I sought to cast off my fictitious self, and be an authentic and fully-expressed me.
13. I questioned and applied critical thinking to my default assumptions and beliefs about the world.
14. I expanded my relational world beyond religious sub-culture.
15. I resisted creating a new religion out of my latest discovery.
16. I operated with the assumption that every human being knew something I needed to know.
17. I resisted latching onto the latest guru, and began seeing all people as my teachers.
18. I explored new fields and areas of interest that were largely unknown to me.
19. I shifted my focus from the question of life after death to making the most of my life before death.
20. I approached my life as a reality I was free to create.
21. I became interested and involved in the lives of people I encountered naturally along the everyday paths of my life.”

– Jim Palmer