“All we can know is our own subjective version of reality. That’s the way we go through our lives. Everybody.”

Can you imagine what it would be like to all of a sudden see another color that nobody else sees?

When we start to talk about gurus, we’re talking about beings who actually know what this is all about. They know who we were, where we came from, and where we’re going. They are not imprisoned in a selfish or self-centered view of the universe.

This is what I do to keep my head screwed on semi-straight and keep my heart open. Whenever I sing, that’s why I sing. Whether it’s at the Grammys, whether it’s in the bathroom, whether it’s in front of 10,000 people or three people, by my guru’s grace, my head stays in that place.

Love is what we are; we don’t get it from somebody, we can’t give it to anybody, we can’t fall in it or fall out of it. Love is our true Being.

The heart in us is deeper than any emotion or psychological issue.

On the Path, it’s impossible to know how you are doing because it’s the judger who is disappearing.

It takes two to tango! I need everybody to sing with me.

I knew that if I did not start chanting with people, that I would never be able to clean out the dark corners of my own heart. I knew it with every cell in my body and mind.

When you fall in love, nobody has to tell you. You know what you feel.

The heart is like a mirror. When we dust it off, we are able to see ourselves. The dust is all our stuff – guilt, anger – this stuff is reflected back to us. Practice removes the dust from the mirror of our hearts.

It’s inexplicable why somebody can lose a leg and it doesn’t effect them at all emotionally; and another person can lose a foot and be destroyed for the rest of their lives.

Don’t wait for a Guru. Your life is your Guru.

Surrender happens by Grace. All we’re doing is cleaning up the room so when Surrender walks in, He can sit down.

Don’t give up on your dreams. You can become the person you know you really are.

Bliss is easy, just take a drug. What is hard is feeling good about our real selves.

Even if somebody tells us something, the hit, the light goes on inside of us, not out there. We learn and understand everything within ourselves.

If somebody had started on a remake of French Kiss before I announced my own film, I would have dropped my subject. If someone else starts after me, what am I to do?

We have two kinds of oppression. Oppression that is universal – everyone in Iran is subject to it. But everyone has also their own, unique way of experiencing this oppression.

Abroad, they have covered pretty much all subjects, explored every possibility, every twist. So similarities between ideas you have and those filmed abroad are quite possible.

But truthfully, we have so many stories, lives and subjects to explore that I’d love to keep pushing towards new knowledge.

The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.