“There is another lineage of sorts, and in a sense we all belong to it. We are connected to this lineage, whether we like it or not. I discovered it in the back room of a bookstore one summer afternoon. I had nothing to do that day, so I walked over to a used bookstore. Once inside, I went over to the religious, spiritual, and psychological section. There were stacks and stacks of books that had just arrived. Hundreds and hundreds of books, all on the subjects that I loved. I was a kid in a candy store.
As I piled up the books I wanted to buy, I noticed that the same name was written in black marker along the binding of each book. RON COHEN the writing said in BIG letters. I paused for a second and looked at the wall of books. It was a mountain! And all of them had the same name on them: Ron Cohen.
When I brought the books over to the counter, I asked the guy who Ron Cohen was. “Oh, him,” he said, “he’s dead. He was a religious “Studies teacher at Illinois State. He taught for forty years, and his family brought them in after he died.”
The rest of the day I thought about that. Here was a man who read all those books. Having lived a long life, he “brought all that knowledge into an understanding, and he must have conveyed that unique understanding in his teachings. Having come together in him, this understanding has now dispersed, like a river returning to its source, without a trace or track. All that was left was a pile of books—that I now own. And one day, someone else will own them.”
– Tying Rocks To Clouds : Meetings and conversations with wise and spiritual people, William Elliott, 1995