...but with my clamoring ego solidly in place, I considered the title, 'Memories of a Failed Nobody'.

Your courtesy exceeds all permissible bounds. [Chinese Phrase]

Your reasoning is fine, but your experience is limited. Enlarge your experience, and your philosophy will be different.

Make your whole life unceasing gratitude. What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master. Taking inward distance, we thus become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.

Most mystics do not want to read religious wisdom; they want to be it. A postcard of a beautiful lake is not a beautiful lake, and Sufis may be defined as those who dance in the lake.

If human life is to survive on this planet, the old dualistic worldview, with people on one side and the environment on the other, must yield to a new vision that connects us with everything else and leads us to care for and take responsibility for it.

...primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.

It is often difficult for those who look on the tradition of the Red Man from the outside or through the "educated"  mind to understand that no object is what it appears to be, but it is simply the pale shadow of a Reality. It is for this reason that every created object is wakan, holy, and has a power according to the loftiness of the spiritual reality it reflects.

...yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world.