“A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it.”

The most difficult thing for spiritual seekers to do is to stop struggling, striving, seeking, and searching. Why? Because in the absence of struggle you don’t know who you are; you lose your boundaries.

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.

A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself.

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline.

As if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.

If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind’s clothing with more sooty knowledge.

A few minutes ago, you knew who you were-you had a history and a personality-but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that.

The beautiful thing about the truth of being is that it’s so unimaginably immediate.

Freedom is the disappearance of that which is searching for freedom.

Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive.

Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.

To accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, “I am this.”

Enlightenment is a destructive process.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications.