The dark and the light are braided and bound.

A Healing Dream can never be completely "interpreted," or fully understood. Healing Dreams want us to stop making sense; not just to crack the case, but to enter the mystery.

Polls show that most people in the world favor humbler, more compassionate solutions to our common problems. Not only favor them but, resolving to love in a more complete and final way, try to put them into action. A society based on universal compassion is not just our only hope; it is an evolutionary imperative.

Unresolved emotional pain is the great contagion of our time — of all time.

Once, at a seminar, I heard a Westernized lama say that a meditator's state of mind should be like that of a hotel doorman. A doorman lets the guests in, but he doesn't follow them up to their rooms. He lets them out, but he doesn't walk into the street with them to their next appointment. He greets them all, then lets them go on about their business. Meditation is, in its initial stages, simply accustoming oneself to letting thoughts come and go without grasping at their sleeves or putting up a velvet rope to keep them out.

By and large, the Healing Dream is not the defender of our waking goals-material achievement, perfect romance, a modest niche in history-but an advocate-general for the soul, whose aims may be diametrically different... The nourishment of the dreamworld is a reciprocal affair: as we provide for it, it provides for us.

Our dreams disturb us because they refuse to pander to our fondest notions of ourselves. The closer one looks, the more they seem to insist upon a challenging proposition: You must live truthfully. Right now. And always. Few forces in life present, with an equal sense of inevitability, the bare-knuckle facts of who we are, and the demands of what we might become.