Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

Early morning, the orange sun is slowly rising, shining forth in empty luminous clarity. The mind and the sky are one, the sun is rising in the vast space of primordial awareness, and there is just this. Yasutani Roshi once said, speaking of satori, that it was the most precious realization in the world, because all the great philosophers had tried to understand ultimate reality but had failed to do so, yet with satori or awakening all of your deepest questions are finally answered: it's just this.

Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence.

Most of us, I suspect, prefer our teachers to be of the Nice Guy variety.

We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, the mode and manner of Spirit's creation, and thus is always going beyond what went before-that leaps, not crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, often stumbling and bruising its metaphyscical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.

On my tombstone, I really hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial.

If the majority of the "spiritual market" is drawn to prerational magic and myth, how do you reach the small group who are involved in genuine, laborious, demanding, transrational spiritual practice? This is very difficult, because both markets are referred to as "spiritual," but these two camps really don't get along very well-one is mostly translative, the other is mostly transformative, and they generally disapprove of each other-so how do you put them into one magazine without alienating them both?