Joseph Campbell

 We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own.

And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives.

In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s.

And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences - ever deeper, ever greater - of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence.