Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

We have to make a disciplined effort to find out what our governments are doing in these various parts of the world and what is actually happening. We have to learn to listen to each other's stories. Something we are not very good at.

Religion is a practical discipline and in the 17th century in the West, we turned it onto a head trip. But it's like dancing, or swimming, or driving, which you can't learn by texts. You have to get into the car and learn how to manipulate the vehicle.

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner.