https://youtu.be/2uGP5AxTpsI "The commitment to truth, or peace, or God, reality, imagine that that retreat never ended. That that was a lifetime commitment. That your life and spirituality are actually the same thing, they share the same commitments. That's what makes for a profound life, a beautiful life." "Spirituality is seeing where we're holding, where we're fixed, where we're planted solidly in opposition to life. Our most fixed position is our whole way of defining and thinking and feeling about ourselves. It's not the only one that's there, though. The primary fixation is the fixation of my idea of me." "Life brings humility. The longer you live, the more you realize that life isn't the way you thought it was. And it's certainly not the way you think it should be. You're not going to conform life to anything. Our mind can recognize this, and as it recognizes this, it stops trying to define and interpret and analyze every little thing that happens." "Trying to be humble is a very arrogant thing to be doing." "Meditation is the embodied form of humility. If meditation is anything, it is a deep and profound willingness to listen. That's what silence is about. Don't try to be silent. Instead, just listen. Listening is a humble thing. You sit down and you listen with your whole being." "The ability that we human beings have to be unconscious is beyond imagination. Come to know that about yourself. It is easy to succumb to unconscious ways of being. Without the acknowledgment of how prone we all are to unconsciousness, to untruth, to unreality, one hasn't made the beginning of the spiritual life. Until your breath is taken away at how vulnerable we all are to unconsciousness, the spiritual quest for deeper truth hasn't begun, because it's predicated upon seeing that vulnerability within the human psyche." "You will never get to a point where you will know the totality of all. You can think you've got to that point; you can imagine it. Even if it is all consciousness, consciousness is conscious of an infinitesimally small amount of consciousness at any one moment." "The idea is to realize that you are It. You are reality. You are the totality. That doesn't mean that you comprehend all of it." "Experiencing life, the way life experiences it, or how the ground of being sees and experiences life." "That may be the very defining characteristic of reality: its unknownness to itself. The reality itself is knowing itself as the unknown itself, as that which cannot be known." "If we're not getting shocked, we're maybe not as conscious as we think we are. We're being shocked by our former state of unconsciousness. 'How could I have been so terribly asleep at the wheel of my own life?'" "You can delude yourself with the truth. You can delude yourself with the awakening of truth, not just your idea of truth, but your actual awakening to reality. You can easily delude yourself and use the truth to do it." "The most dangerous thing in revelation is inflation." "Exposing untruth in oneself. That's what spirituality is. The rest is just a bunch of nice-feeling, nice-sounding, sleep-inducing ideas and beliefs." "To be relieved of it all is part of the great buoyancy of what it is to be awake, because you're not carrying this whole sordid edifice of glorious delusions. You're much more innocent. You walk into a situation; you don't know what should be happening or what shouldn't be happening. But there is something else that does. There's something that can respond to a moment, when we're no longer constricted by everything we think we know. Something can then move, something can then respond, something can relate. But it doesn't respond and relate from a host of ideas and judgements. It relates from being in contact, almost a physical contact, with the whole of the moment." "Contemplate complete silence. Feel into the stillness that always accompanies silence. Not trying to stop your mind. Listen to the silence whether there is content or not." "I hope what you always take away is this silence of the heart and this commitment to sanity and truth and love and the living of it."