Women come to me and would never tell a male guru the things that they tell me. to me and would never besiege the male guru with some of the things that I hear. And that is because mother is mother and that is the phenomenal thing, it's the most irreplaceable thing in the world because whether we're an earthly mother or a spiritual mother, a divine mother, and everyone is divine by the way, we all have the power of divinity, the power of full consciousness, whether we are awakened to the potential of it all is a different matter.

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.

I am a traditionalist, I'm not a conventional person, but I am a traditionalist in the true form of the word, in that your heart is opening, you're absolutely there for everyone, the face of pain has no tradition, by the way, and in my tradition, a guru simply means the removal of darkness.

Suffering comes from not understanding or a full potential or full powers within ourselves to heal, to nurture, to nourish.

I think path in spirituality chooses us. I doubt seriously that we really have much choice in the matter.

Before we understand how not to hurt, we must contribute to the peacefulness of it all, in that if we participate in any way, in anything that hurts, anything that involves killing and hurting, then we're hurting ourselves because we're not islands, we're all connected regardless of tradition, and because of that we're all connected.

That is an incredible period I think when you have a near-death experience. You are really understanding that there is a greater self than the physical body, and the cosmic anatomy as I call it is suspended and physical, is almost attached to it but not quite, and you're living in that in-between sphere of apparent reality around you and then the real reality of the infiniteness of it all.