Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life

Within the heart of illusion is often a kernel of truth, something that you are resisting seeing, something that may be painful to acknowledge but nonetheless has the power to free you from the very darkness from which it came.

The way to see through specialness starts by acknowledging it as it arises. See it as false as it arises—simply an ego-minded identity. Don’t resist it, and don’t engage it. Just see it until you see through. It is nothing more than a thought arising, just a single thought—no substance to it at all. Just be the prior ground from which it arises. Wh

To let inquiry show you how you have identified yourself with a whole array of ideas, beliefs, judgments, personas, and opinions takes both intention and courage. It takes courage to clearly face the false self that we have clung to and the ways that we have become addicted to approval, acknowledgment, victimhood, judgmentalism, power,

As you say, the ego cannot make awakening or redeeming love happen, but you have never really been that small, limiting idea called ego. Relax into your being—that is the fundamental practice. Who are you beyond being worthy or unworthy? Let all self-image transform into loving presence.

One does not need to seek out one’s demons in an endless pursuit of self-improvement. We simply need to face whatever arises with an honest, open, and inquiring mind and heart.

It means to stop defending yourself against your own pain and allow your point of view—your narrative story about your suffering—to open up to new and unexpected perspectives. Holding your suffering in the felicity of love instead of the self-justifying or self-loathing narrative of ego protectionism is the key that unlocks the door to greater free

When you meet the fear of the ephemeral nature of existence, you are also meeting with the uncontrollability of life. You cannot control the transient nature of existence, so don’t try to meet fear from the “me” because then you only have more fear. Meet fear from love, because love can acknowledge transience as well as the fact that you cannot con

At any moment you may need to act, decide, discriminate, make a judgment, etc. Any of these actions may seem to come from a solid self, but upon deeper investigation, any self-sense is but a temporary, changing, and fluid form of consciousness.

It is useful to understand that enlightenment itself is not fixed. It is not limited to any particular insight or moment of awakening; it is also the fluid and dynamic functioning of the totality of conscious life. That is why, with the dawning of enlightenment, there is nothing to attain or grab hold of—there is only the truth as it appears and fu