It’s also for people who have lived a long time with indeterminate unease, inwardly taking up residence at a fork in the road, following neither the more nor the less traveled path. Sure, life shakes us down and sweeps us along. It’s hard to shirk the currents of our nature and culture, and we find ourselves in lives that more or less make outward

There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. D. H. LAWRENCE

On buses in the Andes, people talked, shouted, laughed, slept, and whistled, and radios played. Here, people sat in a pall of silence, as if they knew some terrible, numbing truth.

If what we’re looking for lies outside of imagination or calculation, we can’t know what it is until it hits us.

It wasn’t that you had to transport yourself to other realms. You just had to puncture a conditioned view of reality that had been filtering your experience.

I wanted the result, not the process. Was it just me, or was the Western spiritual way, with its emphasis on redemption, more inclined to results? The Day of Judgment, the end of days: one day, everything will count for something, every last deed and smallest act.

a wisdom that is not knowledge but rather a state of being.

Another is that sometimes we make more progress when we give up. Reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French say: to retreat in order to leap better.

it was about some kind of radical experience that shifted one’s view of things, yet it was also about absolute ordinariness. If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous.