The ego that sees a "thou" 

is not the same ego that sees an "it."

If only I had the time. 

To tell you how I climbed

Out of the darkness. 

Out of my mind.

And I come sliding 

where I've been hiding

Out of the heart of a child.

We are all born as animals 

and live the life that animals live: 

we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. 

There is, however, another order of living, 

which the animals do not know, 

that of awe before the mystery of being, 

the 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans,' 

that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. 

That is the birth – the Virgin Birth – 

in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.

Love as passion; love as com-passion… 

in both the individual is torn out of himself 

and opened to an experience of rediscovered identity 

in a larger, more abiding format.

If you do follow your bliss, 

you put yourself on a kind of track 

that has been there all the while 

waiting for you, 

and the life you ought to be living 

is the one you are living

The hero's journey is a symbol that binds 

in the original sense of the word, 

two distant ideas: 

the spiritual quest of the ancients; 

with the modern search for identity.

God is a metaphor 

for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. 

It's as simple as that.

There are some things so serious 

you have to laugh at them.

Freedom is what you do 

with what's been done to you. 

Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it. 

The intellect is not the fount of poetry, 

may hinder its production, 

and cannot even be trusted to recognise poetry when it is produced. 

Art is not, like science, a logic of references 

but a release from references and rendition of immediate experience: 

a presentation of forms, images, or ideas
in such a way that they will communicate,
not primarily a thought or even a feeling, 

but an impact.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, 

and no fear unmingled with hope.

I don't have to have faith. 

I have experience.

Equipped with his five senses, 

man explores the universe around him 

and calls the adventure Science.

Science is a way of thinking 

much more than it is a body of knowledge.

There is an old standard saying about the arts: 

'You need to learn all the rules, and then forget them' ... 

In writing a book, 

you are moving along on the wave of your inspiration and intuition, 

and then you come to a difficult passage, 

an area you have to cover in order to get from here to there, 

and your momentum stops. 

That’s when you have to bring in the rules.

Nothing is divine
but what is agreeable to reason.

I would never die for my beliefs 

because I might be wrong.

The basic story of the hero journey involves 

giving up where you are, 

going into the realm of adventure, 

coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realisation, 

and then returning to the field of normal life.

Heat not a furnace for your own foe so hot 

That it do singe yourself.

The fluid aspect of impermanence is itself the absolute state.

Work begins when you don't like what you're doing. 

Tension, 

a lack of honesty, 

and a sense of unreality 

come from following the wrong force in your life.

Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, 

it is bound to produce certain themes. 

Dreams are dreams. 

There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be enumerated, 

no matter who is dreaming them.

The theory of our modern technic shows 

that nothing is as practical as theory.

When you follow your passion, 

society’s help is gone. 

You must be very careful. 

You’re completely on your own.

Now, the realms of the gods and demons

— heaven, purgatory, hell —

are of the substance of dreams. 

Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

Evidently it is not science that has diminished man
or divorced him from divinity.
On the contrary... 

we are to recognize in this whole universe
a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; 

so that we are indeed its ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech…

and, by the same token, 

participants here and now in an act of creation 

that is continuous in the whole infinitude 

of that space of our mind 

through which the planets fly, 

and our fellows of earth now among them.

The goal of life is rapture. 

Art is the way we experience it.

We are the sensing organs of the Earth. 

We are the senses of the universe. 

We have it all right here within us. 

And the deities that we once thought were out there, 

we now know, 

were projected out of ourselves. 

They are the products of our human imagination seeking to interpret, 

one way or another, 

the mysteries of the universe....

Life consuming life: 

that is the essence of its being, 

which is forever a becoming.

Instead of clearing his own heart 

the zealot tries to clear the world.

When the intellect tries to explicate an image, 

one can never exhaust its meaning, 

one can never exhaust its possibility. 

Images don't essentially mean anything: 

they just are, 

just as you are. 

They talk to some kernel in you that is.

Life is like arriving late for a movie, 

having to figure out what was going on 

without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, 

and then being unexpectedly called away 

before you find out how it ends.

This is the threat to our lives. 

We all face it. 

We all operate in our society in relation to a system. 

Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity 

or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? ... 

If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life 

and insists on a certain program, 

you're going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. 

The person has put himself off centre. 

He has aligned himself with a programmatic life 

and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. 

And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.

If myth is translated into literal fact, 

then myth is a lie. 

But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, 

then it's true.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, 

clothed with many plants of many kinds, 

with birds singing on the bushes, 

with various insects flitting about, 

and with worms crawling through the damp earth, 

and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, 

so different from each other, 

and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, 

have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, 

strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

Theory guides. 

Experiment decides.

Chance favours the prepared mind.

Science is not formal logic —

it needs the free play of the mind 

in as great a degree as any other creative art.

Myth makes a connection
between our waking consciousness
and the mystery of the universe. 

It gives us a map or picture of the universe 

and allows us to see ourselves
in relationship to nature…

I remember where I came from

When you are in accord with nature, 

nature will yield its bounty.

In choosing your god, 

you choose your way of looking at the universe.

I think the idea of life after death is a bad idea. 

It distracts you from appreciating the uniqueness of the here and now, 

the moment you are living.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; 

but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, 

and diverting myself in now and then finding of a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Why are things as they are and not otherwise?

We're in a freefall into future. 

We don't know where we're going. 

Things are changing so fast, 

and always when you're going through a long tunnel, 

anxiety comes along.

And all you have to do

to transform your hell into a paradise 

is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. 

It's a very interesting shift of perspective
and that's all it is... 

joyful participation in the sorrows of the world

and everything changes.

The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.

Happy is he who gets to know the reasons for things.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; 

he studies it because he delights in it, 

and he delights in it because it is beautiful.