Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.

Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!

Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goats cheese... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.

The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.