Laughter lifts our spirits, surprises and sometime shocks our expectations, allows us to cross boundaries, reorders our priorities, and gives us access to ideas and associations we rarely ever thought to have.

Engaging it produces an intense force, which in turn produces a mutation in consciousness. You become who you really are.

In a world such as ours, where we have to cross the great divide of otherness or we will not survive, love is perhaps the most critical aspect that is there in our humanity, to both activate and to practice.

Over-intellectualizing can justify practically anything. Reason has reasons that can create holocausts. In the 20th century, we have certainly seen how much killing and disaster has been championed with superb intellectual reasons.

Women are rising slowly but steadily into full partnership with men all over the world. This is going to change everything. When the rich mind- style of women is available - with an emphasis on process, rather than on end-product, and on making things cohere, grow and interlink - - then it changes the way we educate, it changes the way we govern, it changes the way we worship.

What happens is that you discover you're carrying so much weight that 90 percent of what you thought yesterday you are thinking about today and will think about again tomorrow. Your mind doesn't change because you are carrying too large a load. So the mind is caught. It's seized by its own structures. It can't consider different ways of thinking or doing or being or relating. It's all you can do with your psychic energy to keep pulling yourself along with this huge bag that you are dragging behind you.

Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so must you attend to nourish the garden of your becoming.