“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.”

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.

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.

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.