However, we need to participate and manage skillfully, helpfully, and harmoniously, for a better world, family and society to be possible. So everybody's spiritual by nature I believe, not that they necessarily have to be religious. Everybody wants, or cares about, and has values even if they don't talk about them all the time explicitly, like some noisy preachers do with their foghorn voices and dogmatic views.

Embracing our environment is a good direction, a very spiritual direction. It's too Aristotelian to separate man from the animals and man; humans from the environment.

Spiritual joy is devotion, it's like a virus you know? It's a benevolent virus, but it spreads. It's infectious. Ram Dass was like a mentor in those days.

I never really wanted to have a Guru, I was more interested in Buddhist philosophy and meditation, and had a psychological background in college, but he had so much love. To be with him, there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. Nothing he taught, philosophy or meditation, are the things I went to India to look for, or was interested in, but he sort of jumped into my heart and then pulled, he pried it open.

We cannot expect miracles of mindfulness in our own lives without preparation, commitment & continuing to energetically progress along our spiritual way.

I started to think more about becoming peace rather than fighting for peace, and the contradiction in terms, and the anger and violence that we were prey to and involved in to some extent in those days.

Everyone has values, and values their family, values their health, their sanity, their safety and security, and their families, their parents, their children, their pets, their environments, well-being in general.