I had been a kind of natural mystic my whole life, growing up there in Tennessee next to the river. Somehow, that was important for my consciousness. I still don't study [mysticism]. I just wait for experiences.

It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.

Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.

The mystics always say that the experience they're talking about is ineffable, that you can't say it. Rumi was asked one time why he talked so much about silence. He said, "The radiant one inside me has never said a word."

The religions of the world are luminous in their individuality, and they have valuable social and soulmaking functions. Surely someday we will quit killing each other over their different strategies.

Just being sentient and in a body with the sun coming up is a state of rapture.

When you meet a new friend, the world has more light in it, doesn't it? Things become more spontaneous, and more full of laughing and freedom and novelty.