A writer, or a beginning writer, is faced by the huge walls of self-consciousness. Most people think, "What if I say the wrong thing? What if I don't sound erudite and sophisticated? I'll be considered a fool." In time, with a lot of practice, you realize that's your foolishness is your gift.

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

Fear is all the fear of some loss: "I'm going to lose something." If we declare, and if we know in our hearts, "I already have everything that I need: I have life, I have creativity, I have joy, I have nourishment. I have everything I need," and if we just say, "It doesn't depend on my having a physical body to do it," then everything opens up.

For a moment, off balance, was I annoyed? Anger is always fear, I thought, and fear is always fear of loss. Would I lose myself if he made those choices? It took a second to settle down: I'd lose nothing. They'd be his wishes, not mine, and he's free to live as he wants. The loss would come if I dared force him, tried to live for him and me as well. There'd be disaster worse than life on a bar stool.

Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even got the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand!

Have you ever felt so at one with the world, with the universe, with everything that is, that you were overcome with love? That is reality. That is the truth. What we make of it is up to us, as the painting of the sunrise is up to the artist. In our world humanity has strayed from that love. It lives hatred and power struggles and manipulations of the earth itself for its own narrow reasons. Continue and no one will see the sunrise. The sunrise will always exist, of course, but people on earth will know nothing of it and finally even stories of its beauty will fade from our knowing.