Moderation? It's mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation...is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew.

I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.

Every positive change - every jump to a higher level of energy and awareness - involves a rite of passage. Each time to ascend to a higher rung on the ladder of personal evolution, we must go through a period of discomfort, of initiation. I have never found an exception.

You can change your life with a simple shift of attention. But to make that simple shift, you have to find your heart. It's the only way. Accept yourself, then transcend yourself.

It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining.

If there is a central theme to what I called "a peaceful warrior's approach to living," and to The Four Purposes of Life, it is that there may be innumerable techniques or methods one can learn (from the Eastern spiritual cultures and from the Western psychological tradition), but that above and beyond all these technologies waits the school of everyday life.

When we feel stuck, going nowhere-even starting to slip backward-we may actually be backing up to get a running start.