“There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there’s nothing there to grab hold of.”

If you resist confusion,you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.

It is easy to imagine that the Buddha, the awakened one, is something or somewhere other than here or that awakening to reality will happen sometime other than now. But as long as we continue to think in terms of time we will deceive ourselves.

One Zen master said, The whole universe is my true personality. This is a very wonderful saying… If you want to see what you truly are, open the window, and everything you see is in fact the expression of your inner reality. Can you embrace all of it?

My experience of fundamental Truth is that it’s a place of extraordinary intelligence. It’s a place from which great intelligence arises. I call it a place of absolute infinite potential.

Often life is a frantic avoidance of the truth.

We don’t come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don’t come to clarity by avoiding confusion.

True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.

When you begin to become conscious, more aware, when your eyes begin to open, the first thing you see is how deluded you are and how much you’re holding onto that which makes you suffer. This is, in many ways, the most important step: Are you willing to be aware?

When someone says, ‘I love you,’ he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, ‘I hate you,’ she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views-literally.

There’s a fierceness about life that calls for a fierceness to not anxiously solve it but to allow it to transform you.

Most human beings have an imprinting that if they’re real, if they’re honest, somebody’s not gonna like it. And they won’t be able to control their environment if they tell the truth.

The separate self is just the conglomeration of these opposing forces. When the self drops away, inner division drops away with it.

We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.

You’re Arguing with ‘What Is’ – Your demands keep you chained to the ‘dream-state’ of the conditioned mind. The desire to ‘control’… is, ultimately, our unwillingness to just be awake.

If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and mysterious openness dawns within you.

[And yet] it is astounding how completely we humans define ourselves by the content of our minds, feelings, and history.

I think I write for reluctant readers. Of course I want everyone to enjoy my books, but if the kids in the back row who normally don’t pick up a book are engaged with what I’m writing, along with the kids who are big readers anyway, then I really feel like I’ve done my job.

Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art.

My children aren’t normally allowed to watch a lot of things that I’m in.

I’m not going to normally get hired to play those emotional things, and I’m capable of it. I was raised by a single mother in Iowa – I’m just trapped in a big, dumb body.

An unpeaceful mind cannot operate normally.

As long as I can concentrate and remain somewhat calm, I can normally do very well.

Let’s abolish the term ‘childish’ because adults normally cause the largest problems.

Normally when it hits two and a half, three hours, the audience gets exhausted and start yawning.