Top Highlights

• Experience has taught me that much of human motivation is a subconscious drive to reexperience the ecstasy of the samadhi. I suggest that samadhi is the prototype for the pleasure side of the fundamental pain/ pleasure response that drives all animal behavior-human or otherwise. But the memory usually isn't in our conscious awareness, only in the s...
• I felt that exploration was somehow at the core of my being.
• weather balloon. Was it? More recent events and disclosures reveal the weather balloon explanation to have been silly and deliberately misleading.
• I came to realize how my early fundamentalist upbringing had shaped my thought, though I was fast on my way to becoming a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic. My mind, I knew, was somehow capable of containing this paradox. Yet for many years I would harbor some hidden fear of God, some fear brought to bear by the residue of that upbringing, a soft whisper w...
• The climate of inquiry, I silently told myself, was sufficiently reverent for any kind-spirited Creator.