In the yoga sutras, they have this beautiful analogy that the journey of life is like the flight of an eagle, or the journey over multiple lifetimes is like a flight of an eagle. First, the eagle stretches its wings high, high, high, and experiences everything that the world has to offer in terms of flight. It's growing and flying and it's experiencing, and then it brings its wings down gracefully and that is the completion of the journey.
There is a role for growth and experiencing the world, and pushing the boundaries of that, and then there is a time to bring it within. All people are at different stages of that journey.
Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U.S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves.
Here are two dichotomies here. In the West it is a very physical practice, and even meditation is a practice to become productive and more at peace. In the East, you think of the deep spiritual practices as a journey of complete dissolution of the self, the ego.
There are people like me who are not there yet, who are still the eagle flying high right now, still experiencing more in the world and growing as a result of that - and that is my journey.
I think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad.
There is no absolute truth that the guy sitting in the cave in the Himalayas is useless, because he is at that point in his journey where he has experienced everything in the world and does not have an attraction to it anymore.
