I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

In my opinion, fundamentalist Christians are just as bad as fundamentalist Islam and, at the very core, neither religion is like that.

The ancient traditions, even Christianity, say God is Love. There is symmetry here. The fundamental step where you get into this transcendent state is this feeling of ebullience, love and caring and unity.

We create our own reality because of our inner emotional - our subconscious - reality draws us into those situations from which we learn. We experience it as strange things happening to us (and) we meet the people in our lives that we need to learn from. And so we create these circumstances at a very deep metaphysical and subconscious level.

I'd like to discover Truth - when I can latch on to something that I think is true.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.