“All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.”

When you inquire ‘Who am I?’ if you are honest, you’ll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. The brain doesn’t have an answer, so all of a sudden there is silence.

The truth is that you already are what you are seeking. You are looking for God with his eyes. I suggest you ask, “What’s ultimately behind this set of eyes?” Turn around to see what is looking.

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.

Man truly achieves his full human condition when he produces without being compelled by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity.

I don’t think we have any alternative other than remaining optimistic. Optimism is an absolute necessity, even if it’s only optimism of the will, as Gramsci said, and pessimism of the intellect.

All things happen by virtue of necessity.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.

Ability and necessity dwell near each other.

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.

Good wine is a necessity of life for me.