“Anything that is created must sooner or later die. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.”

Becoming “awake” involves seeing our confusion more clearly.

In the garden of gentle sanity, May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.

The ideal of helping is to make others independent of you. You help them to become more independent rather than making them addicted to you.

The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle

In order to develop love – universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad. One must open oneself to life, communicate with it.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

There is no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is in itself freedom.

A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don’t appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

It’s possible to be completely enlightened… except with your family.

To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy.

The basic work of health professionals in general, and of psychotherapist s in particular, is to become full human beings and to inspire full human-beingness in other people who feel starved about their lives.

Artistic vision is having the clarity to fall in love with what you see.

You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.

You are sitting on the earth and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there – fully, personally, genuinely.

The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.

Suttas are not meant to be ‘sacred scriptures’ that tell us what to believe.

Our modern Western culture only recognises the first of these, freedom of desires.

Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything. Do not be a meditator. Do not become enlightened.

If you haven’t wept deeply, you haven’t begun to meditate.

The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable.

The best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind.

Buddhists say that a fixed smile, however false, lights up the soul.

The goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians.