The paradox is that we can only truly love each other when we also love something beyond each other.

Ideologies can only ever hope to change our lifestyles; it takes soul to change our lives.

However much we wish the soul’s path to be straight, upward, and ascending, it is more likely to be meandering, full of regressions, downward turns, and backward glances.

The way of soul, we notice, is downward rather than the upward flight of the mystic.

Soul is what turns ordinary events into experiences; what imparts to the passing moment depth, connection, and resonance … The effect is unmistakable: an experience of stillness in our heads and, in our hearts, a fullness … Soul is what is transmitted and received in the experience that we call love.

The trick is to cultivate “double vision” … A sense of metaphor, of translation - of two worlds interpenetrating - must be maintained. But this is also the essential movement of the imagination. We see through the literal world to the shape-shifting Otherworld behind.

Each of us is an individual manifestation of the collective world-soul … we are also and paradoxically contained by the world-soul, like droplets in the ocean.

The task of the human soul is simply to return from its exile in our shadowy, less-than-real material world to an ecstatic union with the One Source of all reality.

Death is a portal into that greater reality that can already be glimpsed in this world as an imaginative experience of the Otherworld.

Imagination, not reason, is the chief faculty of the soul.