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

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.

As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field o

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

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.

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.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT HOW I found a path when I didn’t even know I was looking for one. For a long time I didn’t know where I wanted to be; I just knew I wasn’t there.

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