• "Most of us realize just a fraction of our human potential. We live only part of the life we are given.

• "The culture we inhabit reinforces only some of our latent capacities while neglecting or suppressing others. In the contemporary West, for example, there is great support for high-level athletic development but relatively little for advanced meditation and the metanormal capacities it evokes.

• "Most, if not all, human attributes can give rise to extraordinary versions of themselves, either spontaneously or through transformative practice. This is the case for perception of external events, somatic awareness, communication skills, vitality, movement abilities, capacities to manipulate the environment directly, feelings of pain and pleasure, memory, cognition, volition, sense of self, love, and bodily structures.

• "Extraordinary attributes, when seen as a whole, point toward a more powerful and luminous human nature, even a new type of physical embodiment in which the flesh will be suffused with new joy, beauty, and power.

• "Extraordinary attributes frequently seem to be given rather than earned, and often arise fully formed from a dimension beyond ordinary functioning. Furthermore, their appearance sometimes appears to be mediated by supernormal agencies or processes (which in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian terms are called the "graces of God," in Buddhism the "workings of Buddha-nature," and in Taoism the "way of the Tao").

• "A widespread realization of extraordinary attributes might lead to an epochal evolutionary turn analogous to the rise of life from inorganic matter and of humankind from its hominid ancestors.

• "However, evolution meanders more than it progresses. This is an adventurous universe, in which each advance can be viewed in retrospect as a perilous journey, a close call with failure. Humankind's further advance is not guaranteed nor is the progress of any individual.

• "To last, extraordinary attributes must be cultivated. For a many-sided realization of extraordinary attributes, for integral transformation, we need a practice that embraces body, mind, heart, and soul.

• "Enduring transformative practices are comprised of several identifiable activities, or transformative modalities, such as disciplined self-observation, visualization of desired capacities, focused surrender to emergent capacities, and elicitation of the "relaxation response". Integral practices incorporate these modalities to produce a balanced development of our entire nature.

• "There is an 'all-at-once' quality about these transformative modalities. Like a good business deal or scientific theory, they yield great returns on investment of time and energy.

• "These modalities operate in everyday life to some extent, whether or not we are engaged in a formal practice. All of us, for example, are consciously guided — or unconsciously driven — by images of things we desire, and in most transformative practices such imagery is used to facilitate specific physical or psychological changes. We all occasionally experience the emotional catharsis that is fundamental to many psychotherapeutic and religious disciplines, and we all sometimes practice self-observation. In other words, all of us practice on a daily basis, albeit in a fragmented, largely unconscious manner. Integral practice of the kind we propose in this book aims to make our fragmented practices conscious, creative, and coherent and harness them for health and growth.

• "There is a powerful resonance between body, heart, mind, and soul. All levels and dimensions of human nature respond to one another, and a change in one typically facilitates a corresponding change in another, as when mental images and affirmations affect the body. This resonance exists because all manifest things arise from a common source, which is 'involved' in the stuff of the universe.

• "To last and to be successful, integral practice must be engaged primarily for its own sake, without obsession with ends and results. Its practitioners do best when they learn to enjoy the long plateaus of the learning curve. Preoccupation with goals can cause a compulsive striving that blinds us to the emergence of unexpected goods and that inhibits the workings of grace.

• "Both the theory and practice of integral transformation are still developing and require a mutual give and take. They are works in progress, requiring course corrections. Like science, they involve continual discovery.

• "One reason that transformative practices require course corrections is that they can produce unbalanced development, inhibiting certain capacities while promoting others in a way that subverts lasting growth. They also can give rise to powers that serve destructive motives and therefore need to be monitored by peers and mentors.

• "All human attributes depend upon one another, either directly or indirectly. For example, disciplined self-observation requires a certain measure of courage; sustained meditation requires physical stamina; the control of autonomic processes requires kinesthetic sensitivity. Integral practice addresses this aspect of human nature by embracing all aspects of body, mind, heart, and soul.

• "The grace-laden nature of extraordinary attributes, and the sublimity, power, and beauty they reveal, strongly suggest that evolution on earth is an unfoldment of a prior 'involution,' 'descent,' or 'implication' of that sublimity, power, and beauty in the stuff of the universe. In other words, the world's primary tendency is to manifest great goods that are hidden in it."