“Fear is very often a part of the spiritual path. When people sit down and meditate it’s not at all uncommon for fear to arise at some point.”

Self-inquiry is a spiritually induced form of wintertime. It’s not about looking for a right answer so much as stripping away and letting you see what is not necessary, what you can do without, what you are without your leaves.

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

Sincere and committed now, with absolute honesty and willingness to uncover and let go of any illusions that come between you and the realization of Reality.

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.

The ladle is in the soup pot every day, but it doesn’t know the taste of the soup. You must reflect and meditate.

If you have time to be mindful, you have time to meditate.

We don’t meditate to see heaven, but to end suffering.

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

Remember you dont meditate to get anything, but to get rid of things.

Some actors actually think about what they’re going to talk about during the interview–they read up and meditate and plan quotes and get all inspired. It’s very smart, but it’s so planned. I never think to do that.

It would have been better if the United Nations had sent a team to Mali right away to mediate between the government and the rebels. But where is the political initiative?

In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.