“Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.”

There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson.

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.

Threaten the balances of justice and you threaten the potential enlargements of mind and soul. Therefore justice is part of the safeguarding of the heart.

Democracies should be a delirium of choices – more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer.

No rebellious heart is ever at ease with paths established by others.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.

Canada is like several puzzles that we are all working on at the same time. Everyone has a part to add, but no one has seen the whole picture yet.

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications.

If you make things sound inoffensively obvious, then it is likely that no one will listen.

Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn’t work out in theory.

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

Charisma is a sign of the calling. Saints and pilgrims are defiantly moved by it.

The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes.

The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue.

A believer is someone who senses a consciousness or a direction and believes in it. The one who searches for meaning has not found the direction yet.

Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. There is no sense that anything needs to change, but it does change.

Meditation is a teaching which offers you the possibility of breaking free of this egoic state of consciousness and coming into a whole new realization of who and what you truly are. And all this starts with the willingness to question.

The body is a sensing instrument of consciousness. Without the body and mind, the trees could not see themselves.

There is only consciousness. There is no individual apart from consciousness who is conscious.

Thus the moral consciousness is an innate and intimate revelation of the absolute, which goes beyond (or goes pass, or exceed) every empirical data (or given information).

We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.