“The chief difficulty of the spiritual life is to maintain a simple, qualitative, heavenly position in a complex, quantitative, earthly setting.”

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 21.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 519.

"New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989); originally published in Magical Blend magazine, also in The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992) http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_maps_hyperspace.shtml
Context: There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.

The Black Coat (2013)

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
Context: The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.

Original: (it) Ogni ambizione ha le sue difficoltà. Nella vita le cose semplici non esistono.
Source: prevale.net

Heroes Die (1998)

Source: 1980s, Against The Grain (1986), Ch. 10, The Critic as Clown