“Whatever you resist, persists.”

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.

A few minutes ago, you knew who you were-you had a history and a personality-but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that.

The beautiful thing about the truth of being is that it’s so unimaginably immediate.

Freedom is the disappearance of that which is searching for freedom.

Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive.

Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.

To accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, “I am this.”

Enlightenment is a destructive process.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications.

When you see that everything is a momentary display of reality, then you stop resisting it. Resistance hurts, only every single time. Love is the state of nonresistance.

Meditation is a teaching which offers you the possibility of breaking free of this egoic state of consciousness and coming into a whole new realization of who and what you truly are. And all this starts with the willingness to question.

The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief.

Everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you,

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

The secret of spiritual success is a hunger that persists…It is an awful condition to be satisfied with one’s spiritual attainments…

The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.

Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.

Persist! The world needs all you can give.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.

The brave and bold persist even against fortune; the timid and cowardly rush to despair though fear alone.

Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.