“The self is fundamentally an illusion arising as a reflection of the soul in matter, much as a clear lake at midnight reflects the moon.”

I read that Buddha was able to see all of his past lives, and I realized the only way any of these people could do that is by being outside of time.

That’s sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished.

What is the relationship of the obvious things that we see around us to the things that we believe we understand within ourselves? This is the ancient alchemical formula: “as above, so below, as within, so without.”

Oh, scientific mind. You get all your data from us, the senses, but without us you would be nothing.

Dreams – Language in a dream is unspoken but understood. Words get in the way.

When you start to try to understand everything in terms of words, the understanding of the words becomes the experience, and the experience gets lost.

There is an ability to move and transform things. I think each human being has that power, and it’s often one that we are willing to relinquish to others.

When I speak or when I offer ideas and explain how the universe seems to work from the point of view that I’ve understood, it seems to give people a lift – an unshackling or freeing.

In very subtle ways, how we regard ourselves and others continually changes us into something new.

Asking yourself deeper questions opens up new ways of being in the world. It brings in a breath of fresh air. It makes life more joyful. The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.

I’m not talking to you from the point of view of wishful thinking or imaginary craziness. i’m talking to you from a deeper, basic understanding.

You had to be able to lift yourself outside of the time stream – and that essentially became what is called the yoga of time travel.

What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal

People who are creative often will spend hours doing something and come out of their period of creation and not even notice that hours have passed. In that sense, they’re able to time travel.

We need all three senses of time – a sense of the future, a sense of the present, and a sense of the past – at all times to understand or experience what’s happening right now. It’s constantly unfolding that way.

Reality gets created through acts of observation.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

Forgiveness gives birth to freedom so forgive them and set yourself free from the delusion of their chains and from the agony in your reality.

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.

It took less than half a second for me to realize that, as long as I was truly insane now, I might as well enjoy the delusions while they were pleasant.

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones.

There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s an illusion of fear. Fear is an illusion. If you gonna die, you gonna die anyway; it’s not something to fear, fear is not gonna help.

The beauty of soul nakedness the beauty of ripping illusion out from the soil of us.

We all need illusions. That’s why we love movies.