“If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still.”

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.

In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

You are the doorway to the infinite.

They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life’s biggest questions, but actually, the opposite is true. The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.

Enlightenment means waking up to what you truly are and then being that.

This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow.

You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true.

You can’t look at what’s looking. You can’t think about that which is prior to thought.

Has it ever occurred to you that you are seeking God with His eyes?

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

To speak another language is to have another soul

I’m so tough and so bad, I can be humble and lift another guy up.

Emerson stands apart from the other poets and essayists of New England, and of English literature generally, as of another order.

If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

What I might feel like is hard work, another person is dying to do.