This one question-'What do I know for certain?'-is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.
As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that's unreality. Life doesn't need to decide who's right and who's wrong. Life doesn't need to know the "right" way to go because it's going there anyway.
When the eternal and the human meet, that's where love is born -- not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union.
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.
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?
Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life's biggest questions,
but actually, the opposite is true.
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to
answer your questions, but to question your answers.
In liberation, you stand alone. You stand alone because you need no supports of any kind. You need no supports because you have realized that the very notion of a separate you no longer exists, that there is nothing to support, that the whole ego experience was a flimsy illusion. So you stand alone but are never, never lonely because everywhere you look, all you see is That, and you are That.
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.
The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things. We don't come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don't come to clarity by avoiding confusion.
This moment in which you experience stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
The proof of the depth and embodiment of your realization will be seen in your love relationship. That's where the proof is in the pudding. If it all collapses in your relationship, you have some work to do. And people do have a lot of difficulties in their relationships.
Wisdom without love is like having lungs but no air to breathe. Do not seek wisdom in order to acquire knowledge but in order to live and love more fully.
Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there's nothing there to grab hold of.