“Any story that you tell about yourself causes suffering. There is no authentic story.”

It’s not possible to have a problem without believing a prior thought. To notice this simple truth is the beginning of peace.

Nothing comes ahead of its time, and nothing ever happened that didn’t need to happen.

Until the mind is open, the heart stays closed. The open mind is the key to the open heart.

When you discover that all happiness is inside you, the wanting and needing are over, and life gets very exciting.

When safety is our priority, we live our lives being very, very careful, and we wind up having no lives.

To argue with reality is to argue with God.

Every mind deserves to be free. When the mind is free, that’s the end of suffering.

For me, everything is God. Everything and everyone. So it was just, God needs me now, now, now.

Until we know that death is equal to life, we live in fear.

Since the past is unreal and the future is unreal, all your thoughts are about nothing.

I see the goodness and beauty in everyone, and everything is a gift given for me and for all of us. If you don’t love it, question your mind until you do.

To understand our own thinking is to understand all thinking.

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.

Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom.

You’ve never reacted to someone else. You project meaning onto nothing. And you react to the meaning you’ve projected.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

It’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you are authentic.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

There is no authentic inner freedom that does not, sooner or later, also affect and change human history.