Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everyone is suffering from it.

The vital function that pets fulfill in this world hasn't been fully recognized.
They keep millions of people sane. They have become Guardians of Being.

Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable with not knowing.

When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, 'I don't have time.' But that's the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.

It is not necessary to do things in a state of anxiety or anguish. That is not the way to be aligned with life.

Life always is now. Life is inseparable from now.

When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you.

Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.

If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?

No practice can take you to liberation. That is important to know. It can be a little step that is useful until you realize you don't need it anymore, because after a certain point it becomes a hindrance.

You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity.

If I thought it was my identity to be a spiritual teacher, that would be a delusion. It's not an identity. It's simply a function in this world.

Don't Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won't find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now -- to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.

The false self lives mainly through memory and anticipation. Past and future are its main preoccupation.

Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.

Present-moment awareness creates a gap not only in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum. Nothing truly new and creative can come into this world except through that gap, that clear space of infinite possibility.

For the ego to survive, it must make time -- past and future -- more important than the present moment.

You are not a problem that needs solving.