“Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top of the highest stakes table. Place yourself as the bet. Look God in the eyes and finally, for once in your life, lose.”

The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda.

In silence a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind.

Most people don’t get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says ‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘that wasn’t appropriate’.

Refuse to disconnect from love and every relationship will be totally transformed; even the relationship with yourself.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed.

The truth is you can’t try to let go. Trying is the opposite of letting go. To let go is to relinquish trying. To let go is much more like to let be.

You can’t lose what you serve. That’s the secret. What you serve, you can’t lose. What you don’t serve and what you try to hold onto, you can’t hold onto. It’s always slipping out of your fingers.

The most difficult thing for spiritual seekers to do is to stop struggling, striving, seeking, and searching. Why? Because in the absence of struggle you don’t know who you are; you lose your boundaries.

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.

A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself.

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline.

As if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.

If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind’s clothing with more sooty knowledge.

When I do something, I do it full steam ahead.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.

[H]istory is seen in a rear-view mirror while the future is the dark, foggy road ahead, filled with unknown trouble.

You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But, if you want to be a movie star, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you.