I don't have any fear of death. I do, however, have an inordinate fear of becoming dependent on other people. To me, that's the severest test, not death.

The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.

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

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

Ancient wisdom and quantum physicists make unlikely bedfellows: In quantum mechanics the observer determines (or even brings into being) what is observed, and so, too, for the Tiwis, who dissolve the distinction between themselves and the cosmos. In quantum physics, subatomic particles influence each other from a distance, and this tallies with the aboriginal view, in which people, animals, rocks, and trees all weave together in the same interwoven fabric.

the heart of religion is not altered states but altered traits of character. For me, then, the test of a substance's religious worth or validity is not what kind of far-out experience it can produce, but is the life improved by its use? That's the test. Now, on that score, if you remove the "religious cocoon," the experiences don't seem to have much in the way of discernible, traceable effects.