"What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfillment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with the multiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot go beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital acuumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.
Are there not indeed enough "signs of the times" to indicate that a new start is needed?"

-E.F. Schumacher "Small is Beautiful"

 ‘The great sin against the human spirit is closure against the diversity and variety of human experience -- a narrow dogmatism that insists on the absolute and exclusive validity of some particular language and the particular version of reality that this language articulates. And the central virtue, therefore, is openness to experience, caritas for the difference and diversities to be found within experience'

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

“Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism"

Elemental music is never just music. Its bound up with movement, dance and speech, and so it is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is invlolved not as a listener bust as a co-performer. It is pre-rational, has no over-all form, no architectonics, involves no pre-set sequences, ostinati or minor rondo-forms. Elemental music is earthy, natural, physical, capable of being learnt and experienced by anybody, childsplay......Elemental Music, word and movement, play, everything that awakens and develops powers of the soul build up the humus of the soul, the humus without which we face spiritual soil erosion. When does soil erosion arise in nature? When the land is cultivated in an unbalanced way, when the natural hydrological cycle is disturbed by over-cultivation, when the forest andn the hedge are sacrificed on utilitarian grounds to the drawing board mentality - in short,  when the balance of nature is undermined by one-sided encroachment. And in the same way we face spiritual soil-erosion when man estranges himself from the elemental and loses his balance.