“When we really start to take a look at who we think we are… we start to see that while we may have various thoughts, beliefs, and identities, they do not individually or collectively tell us who we are.”

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.

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.

I think that this year, I just come out and play smart football. I got some good advice the other day (from CBS Sports Dan Dierdorf): Every drive that ends in a kick is a good drive.

And I think that, for those of us that aren’t religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.

I think they’re timid, they’re afraid to actually stand up to these killers. And I think that they’re afraid, maybe for their own sake, for their own political hides, sometimes for their own physical safety. And they don’t take that necessary plunge.

I would welcome, quite frankly, a discussion of morality in this country. I think it would be a wonderful thing if we bring back our Judeo-Christian values once again. I think it could do nothing but help us. I would be all in favor of that.

When we feed our fourteen billion brain cells with information that will enrich us and help others, we are really learning to Think Big.

I don’t think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we’re in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

Ideas come through us, not from us.