And I Realize How Useless Wails Are

To Believe That I Could, At Twenty-three, Sacrifice History And Culture For The Absolute Was Further Proof That I Had Not Understood India. My Vocation Was Culture, Not Sainthood.

Man Becomes Aware Of The Sacred Because It Manifests Itself, Shows Itself, As Something Wholly Different From The Profane.

Whether Religion Is Man-made Is A Question For Philosophers Or Theologians. But The Forms Are Man-made. They Are A Human Response To Something. As A Historian Of Religions, I Am Interested In Those Expressions.

The Experience Of Sacred Space Makes Possible The Founding Of The World: Where The Sacred Manifests Itself In Space, The Real Unveils Itself, The World Comes Into Existence.

Do What He Will, He [the Profane Man] Is An Inheritor. He Cannot Utterly Abolish His Past, Since He Himself Is A Product Of His Past. He Forms Himself By A Series Of Denials And Refusals, But He Continues To Be Haunted By The Realities That He Has Refused And Denied. To Acquire A World Of His Own, He Has Desacralized The World In Which His Ancestors Lived; But To Do So He Has Been Obliged To Adopt An Earlier Type Of Behavior, And That Behavior Is Still Emotionally Present In Him, In One Form Or Another, Ready To Be Reactualized In His Deepest Being.