“When you let go of the egoic self what you’re getting in exchange is the whole universe.”

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.

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.

Regimented minds cannot grasp the concept of confrontation as an open exchange of major differences with a view to settlement through genuine dialogue.

Utility then is not the measure of exchangeable value, although it is absolutely essential to it.

If a commodity were in no way useful, – in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification, – it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it.

As the revenue of the farmer is realized in raw produce, or in the value of raw produce, he is interested, as well as the landlord, in its high exchangeable value, but a low price of produce may be compensated to him by a great additional quantity.

Whenever the current of money is forcibly stopped, and when money is prevented from settling at its just level, there are no limits to the possible variations of the exchange.

The exchangeable value of all commodities rises as the difficulties of their production increase.

Gold, on the contrary, though of little use compared with air or water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods.

I’m exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator