“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.”

Every time you claim, “I am this”, you just claimed another sense perception, thought, emotion, or feeling.

Truth is not over there, wherever over there is. Truth is neither housed in religious rituals nor secret doctrines, nor in a guru’s touch or beatific smile, nor in exotic locations or ancient temples.

Reality is always true to itself. When you’re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law.

The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes.

Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering.

If you have any image of what the Truth is, slay it immediately because that’s not it.

When you let go of the egoic self what you’re getting in exchange is the whole universe.

Now don’t think that awakening is the end. Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.

No one can give you the strength of character necessary… Only you can find that passion within that burns with an integrity that will not settle for anything less than the Truth.

You do it anyway. Why? Because you no longer want to suffer. Because you’re willing to be disturbed. You’re willing to be amazed. You’re willing to be surprised.

Love causes us to be deeply connected in an unspoken way. It happens when we’re really available, really open.

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them.

What you run away from owns you. You are the dog on a leash. The most you can do is to tug against the leash.

As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and life to make you happy.

The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.

Awareness yields to itself, to its inherent creativity, to its expression in form, to experience itself.

It becomes more important to me as time goes on to make every album the best thing I’ve ever done, so it’s a lot of self-imposed pressure that also kind of slows me down a bit.

I don’t feel like a person who takes risks. Yet there’s something within me that must provoke controversy because I find it wherever I go.

All I am is what I’m going after.

You take a guy like George Clooney who goes out there to Darfur, and gets things done! That’s magical. He’s done a great thing.

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.

You’re going to get a sense of what the hell’s going on there. Boy, you’ll wake up fast when bullets are flying over your head.

I kind of knew something was going on, and my older brothers and sisters were singing be-boppish kinds of stuff in the living room.

I don’t like what’s going on in Iraq, naturally. I’m part of a large majority of people who don’t, but I do not know the whole story.