Rumi called his teacher "the friend." And that's what we need. We need friends.

We need to claim our power for something beautiful, something harmonious and something globally healthy.

If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.

I'm calling my initiative take the other to lunch. If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch because there is no shortage of the other right in your own neighborhood, maybe that person who worships at the mosque or the church or the synagogue down the street or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict - or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming.

It isn't so much that God is the unified state of consciousness that each of us came from and will return to, but more so that God is the creative energy flowing between all states of consciousness. God is in the land beyond the mountains, but God is also in the mountains and in the valley of illusions cradled within the mountains. God is not one thing or another, rather God flows between and through all things.

I think it's better that people actually are saying what they feel. Especially, people are saying, I'm not heard. I don't have a voice in America.

Don't persuade, defend or interrupt. Be curious, be conversational, be real. And listen.