Swami Ashokananda was a brilliant and accomplished spiritual teacher in the West.

I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

The most powerful moral influence is example.

Built into human makeup is a longing for a 'more' that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.