This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: "The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.

I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies.

Spiritual intelligence is the capacity to conduct our life in such a way that it reflects deep philosophical and metaphysical understanding of reality and of ourselves discovered through personal experience during systematic spiritual pursuit.

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.

The function of the brain is to reduce all the available information and lock us into a limited experience of the world. LSD frees us from this restriction and opens us to a much larger experience.

I have taken part in ceremonies with North American and Mexican shamans, as well as Brazilian ceremonies.

It is essential that we raise the image of sex, which is currently seen as a purely biological affair and often portrayed in its worst manifestations, to that of a spiritually based activity.