Sometimes my life has been Odyssean - landing on strange islands of consciousness and reality and meeting very curious monsters who turn out to be very great teachers. Sometimes my life has been a quest for a grail of knowledge and education. Like Parsifal, my life has been a quest to pierce the veil, stumbling along but eventually finding it.

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.

We are still a pioneer culture in some ways. A pioneer culture has to put all of its muscle into surviving on the frontier and pushing back the wilderness. So when you start to talk about imagination, inner space, and the structures of the psyche, that becomes scary.

I think of spirit as that which evokes us - the lure of becoming that keeps calling. And I think of soul as that which gets us through the cartography of everyday life.

The tendrils of a new, deeper form of spirituality are growing. It's the greening under the surface crust of consciousness and social paradigm.

Each person is a really a great treasure house of capacities, possibilities, energies.

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