Money is like a mirror to our culture. What we see tells us who we are.

Our modern world-view tragically misperceives and wrongly defines what it is to be human. We are conditioned by our society to believe happiness comes from pleasure, or from getting things or power over people or money or fame or even health and survival. None of these sometimes very good things can bring ultimate meaning to our lives. We are born to be deeply conscious, inwardly free and deeply capable of love. The longing for these things is the definition of what it means to be human.

As to how I would guide someone who is confused about the idea of God, I would suggest that he or she begins identifying what one might called "philosophical friends," - people with whom one could seriously examine our thought about God through listening to each other, reading important and useful books together and trying to think for oneself while familiarizing oneself with the ideas of some of the world's great thinkers. Cultivate openness without gullibility and skepticism without cynicism.

What is it that makes all of us end each day with the sense that we have not lived our time, but have been lived, used by what we do?

The problem of money dogs our steps throughout the whole of our lives, exerting a pressure that, in its way, is as powerful and insistent as any other problem of human existence. And it haunts the spiritual search as well.

If the group is an art form of the future, then convening groups is an artistry we must cultivate to fully harvest the promise of the future.

When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.