Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbed
lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression
could easily be mistaken for ferocity.

In truth, one of our company, the solemn warrior Ecthgow, was so demented from liquor that he was drunk while still upon his horse, and he fell attempting to dismount.  Now the horse kicked him in the head, and I feared for his safety, but Ecthgow laughed and kicked the horse back.

"Saint George and the Dragon!-Bonny Saint George for Merry England!-The castle is won!"

What we mean by maturity in people's thinking is not a matter of how smart they are, but it is a matter of the order of consciousness in which they exercise their smartness or their lack of it.

When we see that we are not made up by the other's experience, we then have the capacity not to take responsibility for what is now genuinely and for the first time not ours. And as a result, we can get just as close to the other's experience (even the other's experience of how dissapointing, enraging, or disapprovable we are!) without any need to react defensively to it or be guiltily compliant with it.

"The amount of consciousness with which you can ravish your woman--the size of your 'spiritual penis,' so to speak--is determined by how fully you have surrendered as openness and love. Practice opening as free being, as unbounded love, even as thoughts come and go, fears clench and pass, and desires ebb and flow."

“It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety, “ assented Syme; “but may I ask you two questions?  You need not fear to give me information, because, as you remember, you very wisely exorted from me a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep.  So it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries.  First of all, what is it really about?  What is it you object to?  You want to abolish Government?”
    “To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic.  “We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists.  We dig deeper and we blow you higher.  We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves.  The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man!  We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs.  We have abolished Right and Wrong.”

In the dream state, the mind and soul are set free to create as they please, to imagine vast worlds not tied to gross sensory realities but reaching out, almost magically, to touch other souls, other people and far-off places, wild and radiant images cascading to the rhythm of the heart's desire.

It was during this period that I stopped off in London and found a book called "A Brief History of Everything" by Ken Wilber.  Although strangely attracted to the book and to the cover, initially I couldn't bring myself to buy a book with such an arrogant title.  At that stage I hadn't discovered many Americans with a sense of irony and took the title to be literal.  (I have sinced discovered that Ken has a great sense of humour and most of our early communications were about "Absolutely Fabulous" and Eddie Izzard.)  The title is meant to be ironic but it is also strangely accurate.

The boys lived in a state orphanage until their teens, then they ran away together. The Lanky Crooner and Fat Rasputin in their own little road movie. The Road to God.