I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.

The Navajo have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. The Navajo say, 'Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I'm on the pollen path.'

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

A temple is a landscape of the soul.