When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)

The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health.

We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.

I should have said, 'Follow your blisters.'