"As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is
something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and
basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a
Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds
which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as
a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and
commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and
thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience
selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I
seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a
rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of
biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual,
sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to
vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even
absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the
whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear
fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old;
my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the
pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy."

In the long run, hell and heaven are both seen to be traps, and final liberation comes with realizing that there is nothing to choose between them.

The more inward and central the form of activity, the less it partakes of the mask of the ego. To unveil the flow of thought can therefore be an even greater sexual intimacy than physical nakedness.