“One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.”

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

Who is to say what is real and what is not?’Real’ is a distinction of a naïve mind.

I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.

The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.

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.

It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians.

In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves.