Below the neck, our body is a duplicating machine for what our mind thinks.

the only person who can cause us to suffer, who can cause us to misperceive illusion and separation, who has this much power, is us. Nothing in the exterior environment causes us to lose a sense of the awakened state. Nobody we meet, no situation we deal with has the power to cause us to fall out of awakening. This is one of the most important

What you have to be willing to do is to encounter yourself and to face your own uncertainty. But how many of us want to let go into uncertainty, into the unknown, into the uncontrollable?

Once they are able to find the thoughts that are generating their emotions, they can start the inquiry into what the thought is, exactly, and whether it’s true. Because, of course, no thought that causes division is true.

Reality is always true to itself. When you’re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law. To me, this knowledge is a grace. Reality is consistent. Argue with it, go against it, and it will hurt—every

Stop avoiding things. If there is anything that is unresolved in yourself, turn toward it. Face it. Look at it. Stop avoiding it. Stop moving the other way. Stop using a moment of awakening as a means to not deal with something that may be less than awake within you.

The ego is constantly in flux. Once you’re onto it—once you’ve discovered it in one aspect of your being—it will disappear, only to reappear somewhere else. It is very cunning, very subtle. In fact, as I see it, the ego’s illusion is one of the most impressive forces in all of nature.

Before we awakened, we either believed a thought or we didn’t believe a thought; that’s all we knew. It was one or the other. But after a glimpse of awakening, things can become very strange. We may believe a thought and not believe a thought simultaneously, or we may act in a way that we know is not coming from the undivided vision that we have

The simplest thing one can say about the experiential knowledge of awakening is that it is a shift in one’s perception. This is the heart of awakening. There is a shift in perception from seeing oneself as an isolated individual to seeing oneself, if we have a sense of self at all after this shift, as something much more universal—everything and