In trying to figure out a way to approach our sadhana, there are a few strategies that I would suggest we keep in mind—and the first and most important one is Relax! It doesn’t really matter which next thing you do, because whatever it is, it will become your next teaching. And it isn’t the thing you do that matters, anyway—it’s who it is that’s do

The witness that’s useful in our spiritual work has a totally different quality. It isn’t judging—good, bad, it’s all the same. This witness isn’t trying to change anything—it’s just seeing it all. It is the completely uncommitted; it’s not committed to your enlightenment, it’s not trying to get you ahead, it’s simply witnessing, nothing else.

One thought! If you’re busy being lonely, all you’ve got to do is to sit down and meditate. One thought away—no loneliness! The moment you give up the thought of yourself as separate —which is the one that’s lonely—here we are again.

His thesis was that the original yogi mystics of India were mushroom eaters from the mountains in the north who’d come down into the Indus Valley; but the sacred mushrooms didn’t grow there, and so they then developed all the yogic practices—pranayama and hatha yoga and raja yoga—to try to reproduce the same states of consciousness to which the mus

“By our calculations, thinking of nothing else, by our desires, abandoning every other hope, by our efforts, renouncing all bodily comfort, we gained entry into this new world. Or so it seemed to us. But we learned later that if we were able to approach Mount Analogue, it was because the invisible doors of that invisible country had been opened to

Maharajji said, “I love suffering. It brings me so close to God. You get jnana—wisdom— from suffering. You are alone with God when you are sick, you call on God when you suffer.”

The suffering born of the feeling that our hearts are closed will ultimately open our hearts. Reason will never allow us to understand that one!

Thomas Merton quote from Seeds of Contemplation; he said, “Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.” It’s only when our despair reaches rock bottom that the opportunity occurs for the heart to open. So if someone says to me, “I feel nothing; I feel dead inside,”—that, to me, is a crit

so make the whole thing much easier, is an intense feeling of love for what it is you’re moving toward. Whether you call that a love of Truth, or a love of God, or a love of guru, or a love of the Mother, or a love of the Void—it doesn’t matter. What matters is what happens in your heart through that kind of intense emotional commitment to whatever