Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.

In the bottom of an old pond lived some grubs who could not understand why none of their groups ever came back after crawling up the stem of the lilies to the top of the water. They promised each other that the next one who was called to make the upward climb would return and tell what happened to him. Soon one of them felt an urgent impulse to seek the surface; he rested himself on top of a lily pad and went through a glorious transformation which made him a dragonfly with beautiful wings. In vain he tried to keep him promise. Flying back and forth over the pond, he peered down at his friends below. Then he realized that if they could ever see him they would not recognize such a radiant creature as one of their number. The fact that we cannot see our friends or communicate with them after the transformation, which we call death. is no proof that they cease to exit.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon.

I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important it itself, but only the whole. The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits.

When we try to explain the complexity of what we see to others who demand that things be laid out in straight paths, they often become resistent and critical... when our viewpoint repeatedly falls on deaf ears, we become silent - avoid confrontation. One source of human suffering arises when our words and actions are perceived, by those we serve or love, in a light of being different from that intended.

What man has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the man of Tao.

The sage never tries to store things up.
The more he does for others, the more he has.
The more he gives to others, the greater his abundance.

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.

Why do the people think so little of death?
Because the rulers demand too much of life.
Therefore the people take death lightly.