There is no absolute truth that the guy sitting in the cave in the Himalayas is useless, because he is at that point in his journey where he has experienced everything in the world and does not have an attraction to it anymore.

Somebody who is purified with life enough would be able to read your feeling before it becomes a word in your mouth. It is not very hard to understand - and you meet people like that. Almost everything is very factual and scientific and not exaggerated.

I don't know if there is really an objective truth about either. I liken this to what Buddhism says about the individual, that change starts with the individual. I think it is really about purifying your own actions, and I have seen that in my own life.

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

Here are two dichotomies here. In the West it is a very physical practice, and even meditation is a practice to become productive and more at peace. In the East, you think of the deep spiritual practices as a journey of complete dissolution of the self, the ego.

I think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad.

There is a role for growth and experiencing the world, and pushing the boundaries of that, and then there is a time to bring it within. All people are at different stages of that journey.