My two favorite things to talk about with the temple: 1) when I was living in Asia we went to a LOT of temples from various faiths, and they all had certain characteristics in common such as a cleansing area, a holiest area, and steps you take to progress and show proper respect to the deity, thresholds you cross, and so on, 2) I have been reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the temple is very much like the Hero’s Journey. We take ordinary people and expose them to not-of-this-world ideas in an other-worldly setting. There are a lot of interesting parallels in all world myth-making because it speaks to the soul and it is the story of spiritual awakening, finding the hero within each of us. Anyway, those are two universalizing angles I like to take about the temple.
