A natural leader by any measure, Paul became a great spiritual leader when his heart and mind were captured by Jesus Christ.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our minds?

If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered dangerous but set in place in their compartmental understandings.

I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn't give a damn.

Then it's goodbye, Sangsara for me Besides, girls aren't as good as they look And Samadhi is better than you think When it starts in hitting your head In with Buzz of glittergold Heaven's Angels, wailing, saying We've been waiting for you since morning, Jack Why were you so long dallying in the sooty room? This transcendental Brilliance Is the better part (of Nothingness I sing) Okay. Quit. Mad. Stop.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

In a sense, I'm mad (and withdrawn from life) while they're sane, human, normal - but in another sense, I speak from the depths of a vision of truth when I say that this continual jockeying for position is the enemy of life in itself. It may be life, 'life is like that,' it may be human and true, but it's also the death-part of life, and our purpose after all is to live and be true. We'll see.

Yet this book is to prove that no matter how you travel, how 'successful' your tour, or foreshortened, you always learn something and learn to change your thoughts.

I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it.

At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.

Ripples in the upside down lake of the void . . . The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down