“Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.”

Everything has a beginning and an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well…In life we cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid loss. Freedom and happiness are found in the flexibility and ease with which we move through change.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?

To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others.

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two our life flows.

As we willingly enter each place of fear, each place of deficiency and insecurity in ourselves, we will discover that its walls are made of untruths, of old images of ourselves, of ancient fears, of false ideas of what is pure and what is not.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.

Since death will take us anyway, why live our life in fear? Why not die in our old ways and be free to live?

We each need to make our lion’s roar – to persevere with unshakable courage when faced with all manner of doubts and sorrows and fears – to declare our right to awaken.

Use whatever has come to awaken patience, understanding, and love.

The waves do keep coming, so learn to surf.

Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.

Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.

Train your mind the same way you’d train a puppy: Be patient, be consistent, and have some fun along the way.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

We define religion as the assumption that life has meaning. Religion, or lack of it, is shown not in some intellectual or verbal formulations but in one’s total orientation to life.

The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else — men, guns, ammunition.

Since we have literally targeted our enemies, the Pentagon assumes that, sooner or later, rogues will take out our cities, presumably from spaceships.

Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

Every economic opinion is associated with a set of assumptions.