Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be… - Joseph Campbell

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

[Marriage] is the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is.

Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals.

I remember a vivid talk by the Japanese Zen philosopher Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki that opened with an unforgettable contrast of the Occidental and Oriental understandings of the God-man-nature mystery. Commenting first on the Biblical view of the state of man following the Fall in Eden, “Man,” he observed, “is against God, Nature is against God, and Man and Nature are against each other. God’s own likeness (Man), God’s own creation (Nature) and God himself - all three are at war.” Then, expounding the Oriental view, “Nature,” he said, “is the bosom whence we come and whither we go.” “Nature produces Man out of itself; Man cannot be outside of Nature.” “I am in Nature and Nature is in me.” The Godhead as highest Being is to be comprehended, he continued, as prior to creation, “in whom there was yet neither Man nor Nature.” “As soon as a name is given, the Godhead ceases to be Godhead. Man and Nature spring up and we get caught in the maze of abstract conceptual vocabulary.”

We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences - ever deeper, ever greater - of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.