Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.

Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.

What is unknown is the fulfillment of your own unique life, the likes of which has never existed on earth. And you are the only one who can do it. People can give you clues how to fall and when to stand, and when you are falling and when you are standing, this only you can know. And in the way of your own talents is the only way to do it.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help.

For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'.