Sublime

Religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word, and on the grandest scale. They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul's nature. From this universal foundation no human soul is cut off.

human belief systems are good at absorbing contradictions into their thinking.

The main teaching in cultures where spirits visit frequently and the world itself is a bridge—such as those of Haiti, West Africa, Melanesia, and the circumpolar peoples we group together as Eskimos—focuses upon knowing the distinct nature and name of the different visitors, their rank, their powers, their spheres of action. These cultures have

It involves feeling your fear of emptiness and loneliness, your yearning for love, and your denial of death.

To further aggravate our emotional woes, modernity has cast aside what had been, since the dawn of time, a central resource for coping with life’s vicissitudes. God has died and there is now little we can turn to, intone in front of, or beg for deliverance from when times grow hard. We dwell in a world ruled by the pitiless laws of science in which

When we live with the tension of the personal will directed toward an imagined future, we live in a mind-world maze of possibilities instead of the vivid aliveness of intimacy with what is.