“Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.”

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Human desire tends to be insatiable.

I owe my solitude to other people.

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.