Thanks. : )

I respect this guru..now if only I wasn't so resistant to living gurus. ; )

i like his skewer..

a long time ago,
i would have been a bit frightened by it..
but i have learned over and over.. that our cultural context is so different from the culture in which it came from, that any impressions and interpretations of it is almost certainly different from what it is intended.

To me, this is very important because I have a negative bias towards our own cultural religiosity symbolism... i can come to Buddhism with a fresh clean slate in which to discover or realize my innateness.