I'm here to enrich my idea of religion. To develop my ideas. To become the new Socrates, but to survive the experience. Tall order?

I moved to Berkeley a year ago to be in a richer spiritual community, both Buddhist and Unitarian Universalist.

I have practically memorized the words of Jesus.

My faith is based on practice rather than creed.

I'm afraid that my concept of enlightenment is quite unsophisticated and simply includes people who are loving and truthful. I haven't been able to get in touch with loftier levels of highmindedness and absolute reality.

When I was 25, I saw through the net of desire and wept. Then, after ten years of strenuous meditation, I had a powerful experience of Light. Since then, I have been working to live in this light as an Environmental Educator, in business, and in Social Services.

I am writing a book on the history of religion and the conflict between Indigenous and Colonizing cultures. I offer a piece of it below. Oh so highbrow. Obviously I have too much education!

I've had some interesting relationships with animals.

Ask me about Jerry.

I'm a big fan of Tommy Turpolene.

It is important to note the difference between two English historians, Edward Gibbon and W. E. H. Lecky. Gibbon is a product of the Enlightenment, and his argument is with organized religion. In the next century, Lecky is deeper in his ambivalence, which is towards the habit of reverence itself. He is deeply torn by what he sees as the conflict between reverence and progress, but by Lecky’s time, organized religion had lost, and the baby was ready to be thrown out with the bathwater. I don’t know yet whether Gibbon had any distaste for indigenous people, how he felt about Rousseau. But it seems that organized religion is seen as being responsible for the “superstitions” of the common people. It could not be possible that the mythology of Medieval European Peasants could be as grand and glorious as that of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. Our regard for a people's mythology and culture, must be in proportion to the size of their military conquests!