“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.”

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.

You can’t look at what’s looking. You can’t think about that which is prior to thought.

Has it ever occurred to you that you are seeking God with His eyes?

You lose your separateness, you lose your specialness, you lose the dream you have lived all your life. Eventually you lose everything that your mind has created and awaken to who you truly are: the fullness of freedom, unbound by any identifications, identities, or boundaries.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. There is no sense that anything needs to change, but it does change.

It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.

Whatever you resist, persists.

Deep down we all suspect that something is very wrong with the way we perceive life but we try very, very hard not to notice it. And the way we remain blind to our frightful condition is through an obsessive and pathological denial of being.

You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.

How do I integrate spirituality into my everyday life? Throw out the concept of “spiritual life” and “everyday life.” There is only life, undivided and whole.

At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.

Suffering is how Life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true. It is the way Life suggests that you are not in harmony with what is.

What will carry us into living freedom is not the holding of attention so much as the holding of appreciation.

There’s something more to life than what we see on the surface.

We must become expressions of, not consumers of, realization.

It authenticates itself. Something inside us knows. This…is what has been sought for, longed for, looked for. This is it. Usually, it’s not what we expected.

Certain temperaments respond to anxiety by pulling inward.

Maybe [success] is because I’m in China and I’m more open. Maybe it’s my independent behavior, or because I participated in certain projects. I have no idea.

To call yourself a Chinese artist or woman artist or African artist reflects a certain kind of condition. To me, that is not necessary.

Being such a tomboy growing up, that was one thing that changed me as a person, as well. It broadened me, like me cracking myself open in a certain way.

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.

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.

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them.

I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials,