What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.
Have you noticed, with whatever quality of love you have experienced, that when true love arises, it opens up both your mind and emotions? It's an openness to whatever is happening.
The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I?
We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.
Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself.
You must choose between your attachments and happiness.
We can't have an idea of what life should look like, about how spirit should be manifesting as our very life, because all of those ideas would just be products of the past - something we learned, imagined, or desired. Once again, we find ourselves back in the unknown - not in the idea of the unknown, but in the lived reality of it. It's the mind humbled, on its knees, with bare feet and free of the known.
When we really start to take a look at who we think we are, we become very grace prone.
Freedom is the disappearance of that which is searching for freedom.
The most challenging thing for the spiritual seeker to do is to stop struggling.
Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive.
A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it.
Take the armor off, so the arrow of the Truth can penetrate you.
As I often tell my students, the person you’ll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.
Meditation is a teaching which offers you the possibility of breaking free of this egoic state of consciousness and coming into a whole new realization of who and what you truly are. And all this starts with the willingness to question. To pause for just a moment and realize that maybe you aren't who you imagine yourself to be.
The world's problems are, by and large, human problems-the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well.
The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that uncertainty and all wisdom will be yours.
Most people don't get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says 'you can't say that' or 'you shouldn't say that' or 'that wasn't appropriate' so most of us human beings have a very deep underlying conditioning that says that just to be who we are is not OK.......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.
All we really want in the end is to be connected once again with the Truth of our being, to realize what it is that wears this mask of self.
We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world.
The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do.
It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.
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.
What is really important you can't understand with your mind.
Love moves without an agenda. It just moves because that is its nature to move.
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