Everything starts with a story.

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all. . . . In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous. . . . It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss.

The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.

There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.