I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.
In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside. As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind's compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.
You can't lose what you serve. That's the secret. What you serve, you can't lose. What you don't serve and what you try to hold onto, you can't hold onto. It's always slipping out of your fingers.
Whatever you want, be it. If you want connection, it's because you are connection. Be what you want, and then it happens all around you. If you want love, be it. You'll have more love than you know what to do with. Whatever you are inside, you receive a thousandfold on the outside.
Be a true representative of the goodness in your heart, and don't expect it to be easy or even noticed.
Grief, unresisted, is grace. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt anymore, it doesn't mean it doesn't rip your heart out. . . . In great grief, there's an incredible love in it. In love there's a tinge of bitter. In true love. My teacher used to say 'all love is bittersweet'. All things experienced fully, reveal their opposite.
I'm a good person," I said, "because I know what good people are supposed to act like, and I copy them.
The law detects, grace alone conquers sin.
To love someone means to see him as God intended him.
The reason I really started running was for meditative purposes. I would pick some problem to have in my head while running.