The mysterious fact about the human being is that he is not content to be a human being—he wants to be a human being plus something else. He wants to transcend himself, and the usual way he tries to do this is to become part of an even larger organism, a social group.

The true paradox of consciousness is that we are never more fully ourselves than when we have forgotten ourselves—and this forgetting is not a loss but a gain, for in losing the boundary of self we touch something universal.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self; the only escape is through the bars of understanding something larger than ourselves.