ACT TWO OF OUR REAL LIVES For you and me, Act Two of our real lives is the passage we live out before we commit heart-and-soul to our artistic or moral or entrepreneurial calling. Like the heroes of our stories, we’re lost. Like our heroes, we’re searching. Like our heroes we reach a point where we hit the wall. Where we, as anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) declared of himself in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, “run out of bullshit.” Writing Seminar, Nashville, 2019 We’ll be getting, in these pages, to the concept of the All Is Lost Moment. When you hit that yourself, you’ll know it.

The human soul is divine.

Every truth has its origin in God.

When it is manifested in a man, this is not because it comes from him, but because he has such a quantity of transparency that he can reveal it.

—BLAISE PASCAL

When after the rain, water flows from the roof through pipes, it seems to us that water flows out of these pipes, but in reality, it falls from the sky.

The same phenomenon can be seen with the religious teachings taught to us by holy people.

It seems to us that this teaching comes from them, but in reality, these teachings come from God.

—THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA

A person’s purpose on this earth is to be in harmony with eternity.

It is only then that the universal flow of love and intellect can be channeled through this person, as if through a clear pathway.

—LUCY MALORY

Life is given to us in the same way as a child is given to a nanny, so that it can be raised to maturity.

Keep yourself in purity, far from evil, so that divine power may come through you.

And in this flow of divine power through you, there is great bliss.