“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form – all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.”

A. The hero learns that Worldly Interests…

1. our realistic fears & hostilities
2. our erotic and religious practices
3. our business practices
4. our wars
5. and our pastimes & household tasks

are ALL based on error.

B. The aim of illumination is…

1. not to cure the individual back to the general delusion

2. but to detach from delusion altogether…

3. not to readjust desire & hostility (because that would only start a new context of delusion)

4. but to extinguish desire at the very root.

5. The mind knows that it is not what it thought; thought goes.

C. The illuminated hero…

1. does not abandon life

2. but discovers that the thought-transcending truth found within (emptiness) is found without in the phenomenal world.

3. The hero knows the same repose (rest) within and without because he has surpassed the delusions of the self-assertive, self-concerned ego.

4. He is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings, living in fright of their own nightmares.

5. He returns and dwells with them as an egoless center = his emptiness made manifest in its own simplicity.

D. Truth

1. The World is Nirvana.

2. Such a one (the hero) lives in God.

3. The hero knows not only that the Everlasting lives in him, but that he —and all things — really are the Everlasting.

4. “Gift waves” go out from the hero for the liberation of us all.