If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.

The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.

And then he says, "The writer must be true to truth." And that's a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting - the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called "erotic irony," the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.

Have you ever looked inside one of those things [computers]? It's a whole hierarchy of angels- all on slats. And those little tubes-those are miracles.

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight's dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognition of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would otherwise have been only an 'it.'

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.