A Himalayan trek is a metaphor for life itself. On a trek we are searching for a majestic peak or high plateau, a beautiful stream or waterfall, or a shrine or monastery. The destination or goal serves to quench our thirst, our desire. It provides a short respite from the rigors of the trail, a brief "One Night's Shelter." Then we have to descend, move on. We cannot stay there.

I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.

There is no death. How can there be death if everything is part of the Godhead? The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.

Now I understood for the first time that all these problems are caused by a race asleep and thrashing about in its panicked nightmares. There will be wars and holocausts and genocides as long as God is portrayed and thought of as a tight-minded legislator, a feudal lord, an offended King, a hypersensitive Artisan – even if church managers condescendingly tack onto that ridiculous list the not-very-convincing footnote that He is also loving. As long as people dream that they are insecure and needy in some sort of eternal jeopardy, there will be atrocities. But as the human race grows up spiritually, and as individuals gain a personal experience of the God they have been worshipping in fear, they will recognize that much of their theology and philosophy is built on nightmares. That will be the day of peace. I suddenly found myself unwilling to sit it out in the mountains of Utah. I wanted to play an active role in the process of the world’s awakening.

In India in particular, where millions have no home but the streets, virtually every life event is carried out in public: prayer, eating, sleeping, nursing, crude dentistry, even bodily functions. In the secular West, where nothing is sacred, everything seems hidden; yet in Asia, where nothing is hidden, everything is sacred.

When I was a child, my grandmother died and was buried in the churchyard in Castlecomer, Ireland.  The following year I went there on holiday.  One day we drove to visit relatives, I in the back seat with my grandfather.  As we pass the graveled driveway leading up to the churchyard, my grandfather, thinking he was unobserved, pressed his face against the window of the car and with a small, hidden motion of his hand, waved. It was then I came to my first understanding of the majesty and vulnerability of love.

Our struggle to put first things first can be characterized by the contrast between two powerful tools that direct us: the clock and the compass.  The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals, activities -- what we do with, and how we manage our time.  The compass represents our vision, values, principles, mission, conscience, direction -- what we feel is important and how we lead our lives.  In an effort to close the gap between the clock and the compass in our lives, many of us turn to the field of "time management."

When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you.

"Property in ideas is an insoluble contradiction.  [He who complains of "theft" of his idea] complains that something has been stolen which he still possesses, and he wants back something which, if given to him a thousand times, would add nothing to his possession."

An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God.  Some of those eyes we cannot bear to look out of, we blind them as quickly as possible.