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“So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you.”

[An interesting aspect of copes is that they often exacerbate the existing problem. e.g. working hard but blindly is a way of doing more of the wrong things that caused the issue one is trying to fix. "Me" only knows how to solve problems with more of "Me".]

"Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God."

[The quest for God is in essence a deeply personal Pilgrimage. It cannot be handed to you by a high priest like a chocolate bar.]

"There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions... But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans r dogmatic?"

[There's a parallel to "Self" hatred, that which inspires such abundant usage of shame and guilt for self-coercion. Is Self really so bad? Or is Self the victim of something else?]

“The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning.” [Acceptance of a path with no end "ends" the journey that seeks a final goody. The end of the path loops back to the beginning like a mobius strip. The is no "other side".]

"As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it’s there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you’ll be endlessly disappointed."

[Turning to drugs or some other non-human form of cope is a way of "Losing self" by giving up on self because one gives up on Other and self is considered just another kind of Other.]

"many people are capable of “loving” only pets and incapable of genuinely loving other human beings. Large numbers of American soldiers had idyllic marriages to “war brides”. But when their brides learned English, the marriages began to fall apart."