Fear closes us down, play helps the spirit flourish

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that he other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.

Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.

Narrow-mindedness will only get you as far as Nowhere, and once you're there, you're lost forever.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.