I have often been told that I am incurably optimistic, and this is true, because in the real sense of the word I am an idealist in its Platonic meaning. Optimism, belief in goodness and light within the human being and the world, and hope for the triumph of light in the world are my way of living.

In my understanding, hope is faith opening its arms in darkness to embrace the light. And in my world hope always prevails over the painful experience of life.

I believe with all my heart that dreams are more powerful than realities; that stories and myths contain a truth higher than historical experience; and that what people call imagination is far more real than what they call the cold and merciless reality of life. For that so-called reality is itself merely another imagination emptied of life—frozen and deprived of the flowing inner energy of transformation.

I have chosen to remain an idealist, a perfectionist, a dreamer, an optimist, and a lover of imagination and imagined worlds because I know that, in the end, each of us will live in a world we create within our own mind. In the most radical sense of liberation, we are free to choose to live in a world in which the sun of love and beauty never sets and on whose peaks neither suffering nor even death is any longer a tragedy.

Aydin Areta