"Unless we are able to make friends with outselves, there is no hope at all. If we abandon ourselves as hopeless, as villains, then there is no steppingstone."

“Meditation practice ... has nothing to do with achieving perfection, achieving some absolute state or other. It is purely getting into what we are, really examining our actual psychological process without being ashamed of it.”

“Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.”

“Even if our state of being is disgusting we should look into it. It is beautiful to see it.”

“The point of meditation is not merely to be an honest or good person in the conventional sense, trying only to maintain our security. We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is.”

“The idea is not to regard the spiritual path as something very luxurious and pleasurable but to see it as just facing the facts of life.”

“Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks which leades to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality; we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism.”