Assume that your drive to experience pleasure isn't a barrier to your spiritual growth, but is in fact essential to it. Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy can make you a more ethical and compassionate person. Imagine that feeling good has something important to teach you every day. What might you do differently from what you do now?

In the New World, you'll kick your own ass and I'll wash my own brain. I'll be my own parents and you'll be you own wife. And vise versa. That'll be normal in the New World - different from the Old World, where everyone except me is to blame for my ignorance and you call on everyone except yourself to give you what you need. I'll push my own buttons and right my own wrongs. You'll wake yourself up and sing your won songs.

Love isn't as simple as you wish it would be. On the other hand, it's nowhere near as complicated as you fear it is. My advice to you is to extinguish any itch you might have to compel love to serve any agenda whatsoever. Instead, bow down before it with all the innocence you can muster, and declare yourself ready to be its humble student and servant. Celebrate through surrender.

Everyone who believes in the devil is the devil.

All of creation is alive and conscious, and all of creation deserves our burning, churning, yearning love. All of it. Not just the people and creatures and things that we personally find beautiful and helpful and interesting. But everything. All of creation.

Break open the forbidden happiness.

Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.