To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.

Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.

The pas has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that.

Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth.

Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.

Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.

I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.

Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.

I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.

The foundation of greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment, instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.

Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.

It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

When another recognizes you, that recognition draws the dimension of Being more fully into this world through both of you. That is the love that redeems the world.

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.

When there is spiritual awakening, you awaken into the fullness, the aliveness, and also the sacredness of now. You were absent, asleep, and now you are present, awake.

For many people, the first indication of a spiritual awakening is that they suddenly become aware of their thoughts. They become a witness to their thoughts, so to speak. They are not completely identified with their mind anymore and so they begin to sense that there is a depth to them that they had never known before.

The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body - to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life. The more consciousness you direct into the inner body, the higher its vibrational frequency becomes.

A true spiritual teacher does not have anything to teach in the conventional sense of the word, does not have anything to give or add to you, such as new information, beliefs, or rules of conduct. The only function of such a teacher is to help you remove that which separates you from the truth of who you already are and what you already know in the depth of your being

Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret.

Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you're waiting for the elevator - instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence.

Is fear preventing you from taking action? Acknowledge the fear, watch it, take your attention into it, be fully present with it. Doing so cuts the link between the fear and your thinking. Don't let the fear rise up into your mind. Use the power of the Now. Fear cannot prevail against it.

Many people identify their sense of self with the problems they have, or think they have.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don't see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it's beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

If you have a strong ego [and] something good happens to an acquaintance of yours, [it] makes you feel bad. It's called envy. ... The ego thinks something has been taken away from you because somebody else has received something good. It's a complete illusion, but that's the madness of the ego.

Thinking is a wonderful tool if it's applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you're dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted.

Space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer 'other.' In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.

Ego means self-identification with thinking, to be trapped in thought, which means to have a mental image of "me" based on thought and emotions. So ego is there in the absence of a witnessing presence.

We get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating - lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. Nature can show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds.

When you continuously know and sense yourself as the space of consciousness rather than what appears in consciousness - sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions - then it can be said that you are enlightened... except that you wouldn't think or speak of yourself as 'enlightened', because that would instantly create another mind-based conceptual identity and so it would be the end of 'your' enlightenment.

Thinking is compulsive: you can't stop, or so it seems. It is also addictive: you don't even want to stop, at least not until the suffering generated by the continuous mental noise becomes unbearable.

Sometimes people need to experience acute suffering before the thinking and the awareness of the consciousness separate. People then realize there is another dimension in them that is not thinking but the ability to be aware of thinking. It is not emotion but the ability to be aware of emotion.

The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.

In any relationship, especially marriage, be as free of compulsive thinking as possible. In other words, the more space there is in the relationship - inner space - the more love there is because love arises out of the inner spaciousness.

If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream.

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.

Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.

You can't think about presence, and the mind can't understand it. Understanding presence is being present.

You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know that you have it. This includes abundance.

You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know that you have it. This includes abundance.

When this delusion of utter separateness underlies and governs whatever I think, say, and do, what kind of world do I create?

Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are.