The secret teaching was the bodhisattva ideal, to live for others, for the welfare of all beings. That's enlightenment, not some flashy state of luminosity.

If you are truly wise, you love life very deeply. You love the things in your life, transient though they may be.

There are lifetimes where one goes off into the Himalayas and meditate in a cave. But this is not really one of those lifetimes for most people. Our earth has changed.

All things are spiritual. It doesn't matter what you do or who you are or what kind of blue jeans you wear, or whether you wear an ochre robe or whether you're sober or asleep or dreaming. It's all the same.

We are intelligent atoms. We are intelligent organic structures. We can change who we are. We can heal ourselves. With genetic engineering, we are considering changing the physiological structure of the body.

Nirvana is a word that means enlightenment, being beyond the illusion of birth and death, the illusion of pain, the illusion of love, the illusion of time and life.

In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.