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

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.

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.

An organism that survives well, there is really no need for consciousness in there.

What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.

I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.

Yoga is when you feel pure consciousness and spirit.

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.

When consciousness has no thoughts in it, one can experience spirit and live in harmony with the universal forces.

The surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.