Suffering is there because there's something we're not understanding about our full divinity, and there are so many ways we could go into understanding.

I discovered that some things are written for us. It's not that we can't change our ancestral bearings, or that the path or purpose of any of our lives is really written in stone. But what tends to happen sometimes is the path is so deeply inscribed in the birth that it becomes you and every variation away from it brings you back in ways that you are not controlling.

I've never been uncomfortable with the host of modern gurus, and gurus of different motivations I should say, or different intentions. You know, we are moving into a time where it's extremely commercial, but then I keep reminding those that I speak to that consciousness has no products, it really has no commerciality.

We think that we have to do so many things and it's unfortunate, entire modern society is besotted with the do-ables, we have to do this, we have to have a half-hour of yoga, an hour of meditation, 2 hours of this, and then 12 hours of work and non-stop electronic gadgets, gizmos etc. etc., and then go home and take care of the family, and then take the children to wherever, and what tends to happen is we do way too much. The society does way too much. One of the greatest things in healing is try for just one day to do nothing. Very difficult.

When the seasons change, we experience a sympathetic internal shift. All life-forms open themselves up to receive cosmic redirection from nature during these crucial seasonal transitions, so we are likely to be more vulnerable and unsettled.

Women are different from men in major, major ways. I have found more courage in women than you could ever find in men, and I love men, in terms of father, brother, everyone, disciples, students etc. Yet men have certain powers of compassion that are hard-pressed to be found in a woman to that degree.

A traditionalist can sometimes be looked at as someone who is a fundamentalist, or they can be looked at as someone with a very strict set of understandings of human nature. But a traditionalist in the Vedic tradition, is one who is open-hearted, who does not judge, there's nothing to judge whatsoever, who understands the basic understanding and karma of all of it, and who basically helps when help is called for.