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This leads me of course to at least mention here the cruel methods used in the slaughtering of animals and fowls for human consumption. The creatures are treated as if they possessed no feeling or consciousness of their own - and such attitudes show a most unfortunate misreading of natural events. As a direct result, at least as many diseases develop through such procedures as would exist in a highly primitive society with unsanitary conditions.

It is unfortunately often - but not always - true that individuals who carry strong religious feeling are often bothered more than usual by poor health and personal dilemmas. The fact is that religions have been the carriers of some of the best ideas that man has entertained - but it has also held most stubbornly to the most troublesome concepts that have plagued mankind.

Many people ask, for example: What is the purpose of my life? Meaning: What am I meant to do? But the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being. That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.

To one extent or another, then, you learn to constantly monitor your behavior, so that it conforms to the established criteria set up for sane or rational experience. You are social creatures, as the animals are. Despite many of your cherished, erroneous beliefs, your nations exist as the result of cooperation, not competition, as do all social groupings.

Without exception, all of the horrors connected with Christianity’s name came from following the letter rather than the spirit of the law, or by insistence upon literal interpretations -- while the spiritual, imaginative concepts beneath were ignored.

If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that attracts to yourself events that - again - will confirm your beliefs.

The species is in a state of transition, one of many. This one began, generally speaking, when the species tried to step apart from nature in order to develop the unique kind of consciousness that is presently your own. That consciousness is not a finished product, however, but one meant to change, [to] evolve and develop. Certain artificial divisions were made along the way that must now be dispensed with. You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you - not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth. You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological heritage.

You cannot love someone you do not know -- not unless you water down the definition of love so much that it becomes meaningless.

In dreams you are so 'dumb' that you believe there is a commerce between the living and the dead. You are so 'irrational' as to imagine that you sometimes speak to parents who are dead. You are so 'unrealistic' that it seems to you that you visit old houses, long ago torn down, or that you travel in exotic foreign cities that you have actually never visited. In dreams you are so 'insane' you do not feel yourself locked in a closet of time and space, but feel instead as if all infinity but waited your beckoning.

Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words-so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different 'words' for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before. The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards. In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.

The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied — it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.