Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it - life begins in slime and ends in intelligence - whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins put the matter: We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else take it for granted that they are descended from gods.

Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.

The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.

In the post-individualistic era, science and spirituality will become allies, and human beings will realize a vast potentiality now only dimly felt.

We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.

...yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world.

All -isms end up in schisms.