I'm going to start with Pathways to Bliss, a book that I've been reading over and over for the past, oh, two years. It's a collection of his lectures, and there is a staggering amount of useful information therein. It'll probably take me some months to get through it all here. Let's begin.

To know others is wisdom; to know yourself is enlightenment; to master others requires force; to master yourself requires true strength.

...begins the book, a quotation from Lao-Tzu's Tao-te Ching. I was rather taken with Taoism in high school, and went so far as to walk around barefoot whenever I could because, at the time, that's what I thought Lao-Tzu would do. He certainly wouldn't wear sneakers, at any rate; and when I couldn't pad around with denuded soles, I settled for sandals. At one point, a leering fag who taught Latin at my high school took me aside to describe the historicity of sandal-wearing; he thought that I was interested in feet (as perhaps he was as well, since after all he had a time-line of sandals at the tips of his fingers), and I was too mortified by his attention to retain what he was telling me. But I was only marginally aware of my bare-footedness -- when people would make a big deal about it, I was genuinely confused and a little annoyed: didn't they see how ancient and Chinese I was being?

Taoism eventually lost my interest when I hit a ceiling of understanding, above which I simply could climb no further. (It was low.) But there was something about it that grabbed me, and something about Joseph Campbell's lectures in Pathways to Bliss that grabs me now; and I think that they are both the same thing.

The idea is that there is a little doorbell in your mind, and a door that opens onto something new that is somehow familiar -- "ah yes, that's what I've been looking for all this time" -- and then you are content. Oh but what is that? What does it mean, really? Where's the doorway? How to you open it and walk through? That hunt for the door has always fascinated me; and now, the more I look back on the fun I've had trying to pry open paths, I realize that I've been lounging happily on its threshold all the time.

I have not even yet reached the book's table of contents. Did I say months?