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

Certainty is usually a sign of pathology.

We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

May the ability to see many points view keep us gentle.

The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve.

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.