“Through the fantastic trick of self-reference, our thoughts make the intangible phantasmagoria of present experience feel like a substantial external world unfolding across space and time.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Instead of contemplating our experiences in an open and self-reflective manner, trying to sense their symbolic meaning in a way analogous to how a therapist analyzes dreams, we continuously search for external references in a futile quest to determine their ‘validity.’ In doing so, we close ourselves up to reality and proceed to tirelessly chase our own tails. You see, there is nothing more to the world than experience itself. What meaning can there be in trying to determine the ‘validity’ of an experience?”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“When we had unsettling dreams as children, our parents would try to reassure us with that fatidic statement: ‘Forget about it, it was just a dream!’ That was a seminal moment in the process of our entrancement. It was then and there that we began to learn that an experience is either bigger than ourselves - the ‘real world out there’ - or so insignificant that it should be dismissed without a thought. It was then and there that we began to slice away huge chunks of our mental lives and throw them in the garbage bin, while elevating other chunks - the ones that weren’t just dreams - to the status of oppressive external tyrants... It inculcates the notion that each and every experience is to be categorized as either nothing or other; that each and every experience must either be killed or exiled. By doing this, we surrender intimacy with our own lives and become estranged from ourselves… Whether we reject or project the reality of an experience, we isolate ourselves from it. We avoid responsibility for it. Perhaps most importantly, we circumvent the need to identify with it. But in doing all this we become, at best, small and insignificant ourselves: What is left for us to be? Ironically, thus, our neurotic attempt at self-preservation is precisely what causes the existential despair from which we succumb.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The only meaningful way to conceive of truth implies that truth is internal, not external.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Whether we live in transcendence or existential despair is simply a matter of which type of myth - religious or deprived - predominantly composes our world.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Dismissing myth is tantamount to dismissing life, for the bulk of our world is made of myths, whether religious or deprived. The world consists of symbols of the nature of mind projected out and reflected on the mirror of human awareness, so to enable self-inquiry.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“We must look where all reality resides: our own mind, profound aspects of which are given symbolic expression in the form of religious myth.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“True religious myths … acknowledge transcendence and foment the openness - the faith - that is precondition to the final leap to freedom. They bring us to the edge of what can be achieved within the framework of language, space and time, priming us for grace.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“It is your head that is in your mind, not your mind in your head.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“You're the one who made it seem like we were doing something wrong. Maybe you still feel like that, because for whatever reason, you think I'm not good enough for you. But I like you, okay? I've liked you from the very beginning."
"It was never going anywhere"
"Because you wouldn't let it go anywhere.”
Source: Not That Kind of Girl