The greatest revolution in our generation is that of human beings, who by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

We get 150 notices a week for seminars.

I feed on conferences.

The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.

Health and disease don't just happen to us. They are active processes issuing from inner harmony or disharmony, profoundly affected by our states of consciousness, our ability or inability to flow with experience. This recognition carries with it implicit responsibility and opportunity.

Never have so many been so high so often. When a Boston research group decided to compare the effects of marijuana on experienced and inexperienced users, it took them two months to line up nine student subjects who had never used marijuana.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing. We have not fully recognized this process of leaping ahead, however, in part because textbooks tend to tame revolutions...They describe the advances as if they had been logical in their day, not all shocking.

Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.

We are constantly nothing but a bunch of energy being processed. Into this whirlpool, the more complex the system, the more energy it requires to hold it together. Therefore, the more complex -- the scientists call it 'coherent' -- the more fluctuations are possible.

A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical changes in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history... this benign conspiracy for new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history.

'Focusing' is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body's wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.

Despair is a cop-out, the ultimate abdication of all responsibility, in which people feel justified in their feelings of impotence. But if, on the other hand, you feel that your work in the world does make a difference and that you do have the power to change things, the nay-sayers will turn a deaf ear.

I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass. So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric -- not arithmetic -- impact. This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history.

Victory doesn't lie in taming our nature but in progressively discovering and revealing more of it.

Academicians get nowhere.

The person and society are yoked, like mind and body. Arguing which is more important is like debating whether oxygen or hydrogen is the more essential property of water.

The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available.

Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.

The most disturbing and wasteful emotions in modern life, next to fright, are those which are associated with the idea of blame, directed against the self or against others.

Depression can be a signal to reexamine assumptions and change strategies--a slowing down to reorient. If we are to deal effectively with problems, we have to see them realistically. And we have to define our purpose... The best antidepressants are expression and action--engagement in the struggle. That way depression is not an end, but a meaningful beginning.