Why don't we just expand ourselves into our perfect form, our perfect being?

In the practice of sitting meditation you relate to your daily life all the time. Meditation practice brings our neuroses to the surface rather than hiding them at the bottom of our minds. It enables us to relate to our lives as something workable.

For the very reason that we expect things to be good and beautiful, they won't be. In genuine spirituality, we don't look for bliss.

If kindness doesn't work, try more kindness.

For the warrior, every moment is a challenge to be genuine, and each challenge is delightful. When you let go properly, you can relax and enjoy the challenge.

The ideal of helping is to make others independent of you. You help them to become more independent rather than making them addicted to you.

The point of meditation is not merely to be an honest or good person in the conventional sense, trying only to maintain our security. We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is.

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

Fearlessness is extending ourselves beyond our limited view.

Humans are the only animals that try to dwell in the future. You don't have to purely live in the present situation without a plan, but the future plans you make can only be based on the aspects of the future that manifest within the present situation.

You must personally accept the responsibility of improving your own life.

When you are frightened by something, you have to relate with fear, explore why you are frightened, and develop some sense of conviction. You can actually look at fear. Then fear ceases to be the dominant situation that is going to defeat you. Fear can be conquered. You can be free from fear if you realize that fear is not the ogre. You can step on fear, and therefore, you can attain what is known as fearlessness. But that requires that, when you see fear, you smile.

You are sitting on the earth and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there - fully, personally, genuinely.

Enlightenment is like witnessing the brilliant sun for the first time in the morning. It is like seeing the beautiful flowers that grow in the woods, the frolicking deer, a bird flying proudly, or fish swimming. Life is not all that grim. In the morning when you brush your teeth, you can see how shiny they are. Reality has its own gallantry, spark, and arrogance. You can study life while you are alive. You can study how you can achieve the brilliance of life.

We should see money in terms of the expenditure of energy and how we are going to transmute that energy into a proper use.

Life is a straight drink - straight pleasure, straight pain, straightforward, one hundred percent.

Becoming a warrior and facing yourself is a question of honesty rather than condemning yourself. By looking at yourself, you may find that you've been a bad boy or girl, and you may feel terrible about yourself. Your existence may feel wretched, completely pitch-black, like the black hole of Calcutta. Or you may see something good about yourself. The idea is simply to face the facts. Honesty plays a very important part. Just see the simple, straightforward truth about yourself.

The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be very brave as well.

You can't feel the earth if you can't feel the space.

Even fear itself is frightened by the bodhisattva's fearlessness.

The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.

I would like to say, ladies and gentlemen, that you shouldn't be afraid of who you are. That's the first key idea. You shouldn't be afraid of who you are. You should NOT be afraid of who you are. It's very important for you to realize that.