The personality doesn’t know what else to do if it doesn’t do these two things. “If I don’t try to get something good or get away from something bad, what else is there?”

the universal levels of essential reality where the beauty, fulfillment, and possibility are beyond human imagination.

Then, if you allow yourself to feel the deficiency, the emptiness, you may find the essential part of you that will fill the hole from the inside, once and for all.

Our normal, mental memory can’t remember the state of Essence.

when you believe otherwise—the most important thing is to make a great effort to disidentify from the feelings when you are feeling judgmental, opposed to the Work, or preferring something else. You need to disidentify and understand what is happening because it is during those very times that you are trying to defend against something very importa

You say, “I want to stay the way I am, but I want to be happy.” Well, maybe that’s not possible. Maybe part of the character of this person you are now is unhappy.

You see, if you are an impeccable warrior and you have arrived at essential certainty, indulgences don’t come back.

But Zen was too hard, too slow. Only one in ten thousand students makes it through the Zen approach, and then only after sitting and staring at a wall ten hours a day for years. No excitement, nothing. If you can tolerate sitting for maybe twenty years and let all the resistances move

matter of getting better or becoming a more perfect person.