GERARD FOURNIER
In short, beware the fuzzy-headed and their fuzzy-headed mysticism. There are plenty of muddled minds out there with outrageous claims and fake mystery cults, only too happy to replace your will with their own. The trick is to never relinquish your will, your inner desires, to anyone. What should be emblazoned across the cover of these books (instead of the glowing raves from fellow experts) is that none of this is of any use unless you take full responsibility for every step of your life.
There is no magic bullet. There is no such thing as any number of steps to nirvana. You cannot purchase a weekend to enlightenment.
BERNIE SIEGEL
If you say, “Can someone change their life”, my statement is yes. Most of us need to hurt in order to change. Not because someone suggests it. But we say we're in pain. I don't like it. Maybe we'll change. If someone comes to me with a complaint about their life, I say change your life. If they say how do I change my life, I'm stuck in a job, or my insurance, and I say if you don't like it and you can't change it, then change your attitude toward life. If someone is miserable that's them, and they're responsible, it’s their participation and their choice. I don't care again if you're in prison, or you have parts of your body missing or you have an illness. If you want to be happy, then choose happiness. That may sound like an absurd statement. But talk to survivors of concentration camps and a whole host of others things. They are talking about their choice.
And that's what we have. Ultimately only one choice. My feelings, my attitude, my mood. If I want to be miserable, I can be miserable. That's very easy. And I don't have to change my wife, I don't change my children, I don't have to change my job. I can just choose to be miserable. And on the other hand I can keep all those things and wake up every day and say I'm choosing happiness. There's a very simple statement I read the other day: "If you're here to contribute love you'll find happiness. If you're here to get something....you will always be suffering because you never get enough." I meet people angry because they never got enough and they were so nice to everyone... then I could have said to them, “Don't be so nice to everyone...it's okay to ask for your needs.”
GERARD FOURNIER
The hero’s journey is thus the homeward journey, a going out in order to come back in. That is the religious quest, not the spiritual quest which we are traveling on here. In fact, as Sam Keen says, “The spiritual quest is the reverse of the religious pilgrimage. The (spiritual) quest begins when an individual falls into a spiritual ‘black hole’ in which everything that was solid vaporizes.”
You are no longer certain that your faith is the one true faith or that you are a chosen people. You question the authorities, no longer taking their word for anything. You realize, one day, that you’re no longer on that comfortable path. You are exploring in areas “not yet mapped, whose boundaries are not yet known.” You begin to experiment. Your life becomes absorbed by the great mythic questions.
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