“If people are living their lives for security and comfort and pleasure, then mind’s every waking moment will be plotting those things. That’s how it stays identified – as a body, as a you.”

It is easy to be swept away by some overwhelming feeling, so it’s helpful to remember that any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says, “You’re caught in the dream.”

The best way of leading people is to let them find their own way.

No one has ever been able to control his thinking, although people may tell the story of how they have. I don’t let go of my thoughts-I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.

Everyone in your life is a figment of your imagination–even you.

The only thing you fear is the unreality that you yourself have invented.

When your mind opens, the whole world falls into place.

Reality doesn’t wait for your opinion, vote, or permission, sweetheart. It just keeps being what it is and doing what it does.

Realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies.

A thought is harmless unless we believe it.

In my experience, we don’t make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn’t personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.

We say to others only what we need to hear.

I didn’t fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.

When a thought hurts, that’s the signal that it isn’t true.

That’s where the fear comes from-from your uninvestigated thoughts.

Until you can see everything in the world as your friend, your work is not done.

You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible.

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

I’ve always been interested in films where you can identify with the actors.

So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn’t expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.

Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

Gratitude is what we are without a story.

It’s not a little thing to lose your identification and who you believe yourself to be.

You never identify yourself with the shadows cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body either.

If I could give you only one advice, I would say: Don’t identify with anything. Be completely empty – no one. Be no-body and see if you lose anything but delusion.