I think that the more people go through their own personal initiations, the less collective destruction may be unleashed on the planet.

The unbroken realization that you are indivisible from the universe, from universal consciousness, from the source of everything - that you are that source, that there is no other, no second, nothing that is not part of that unity, except as transitory illusion. If you could maintain that realization at all times, through waking and sleeping states of consciousness, across the threshold of death itself, what would you be?

I totally think we have a future on the planet. I just think that we have to get away from Western thinking, which is very much founded on dualisms.

People used to make their own clothes, now they buy clothes. People used to take care of their own kids, now they pay other people do it. And that was because capitalism requires more and more things being turned into money - being turned into profit. But that has reached this absurd limit where there's nothing left to turn into money, and the capitalist system is breaking down.

Reality, as you currently experience it, is something like a waking dream. It is disguising deeper and more intensified levels of being and knowing. For those who are ready and willing, the doors to those other levels now stand open.

If consciousness is the ground of being rather than an epiphenomenon of physical processes, we may find that a basic question asked by modern astronomy and space science- 'Is there life out there?'- should be rephrased. Organic life, as well as intelligence, may already be a property enmeshed in the fabric of the cosmos, brought to fruition through the spiraling dynamics of the solar system and the galaxy, built into the structure of the universe itself.

Electronic culture created soulless replacements for connective rituals- television supplanted tribal legends told by the fire; 'fast food' consumed in distraction took the place of a shared meal. We substituted matter for Mater (feminine principle), money for mother's milk, objects for emotional bonds.