"One could make a nice link between imagination and spirit. To make that link, all we need is some inspiration. Essentially, imagination has the innate potential to compel or inspire and to set in motion causation. That's why it exists."

"I don't really consider myself to be a teacher, although I understand that others do. There's a certain restriction or reduction in that stereotype that doesn't ring true. Especially the underlying assumption that I know something that others don't, and my job is to give them what I know. That's simply not true."

"The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them."

"Ironically, to "inspire means to breathe, to infuse life by breathing. As with a lot of things that have the capacity to inspire, it takes some time to get past the apparent boredom and find the hidden secrets. I figure if I keep harping on it, maybe someone will eventually explore the possibility long enough to realize just how breathtaking it is."

"Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there."

"By music I mean the 'spirit of the game,' which is what all spirituality ultimately points to - 'I hear the voice' (of Nature, God, beauty, truth, love). Hear it and move onto or into. The easiest way to do that is to notice and invest in whatever it is that provokes wonderment. You could call this coming back to mysticism as a way of life. We were all already there as children."

"By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer."

"Meditation, in contrast, is the accidental moments of actual harmony that arrive anyway when you are trying to get something, even in trying to get harmony or calm. This often happens outside of the intention to meditate, and most people access the beginnings of this through other events, such as walking, working, athletic activities, or transitional moments, such as between waking and sleeping. The effect, in brief, is one of harmony and well-being, from which other insights or intuitive glimpses can naturally emerge. The moment you notice this, the meditation is over."

"Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you."

"If you, one, loves something or someone, that means that one is willing to, and does, sacrifice for it. That is, one chooses to do and give what is better to the being or thing one loves than to sacrifice the loved one for the personal emotion that is unrelated to or even hinders the giving. In other words, the way to transform an emotion is with a deeper one. This involves discernment and, yes, discipline, which are both frowned upon and seen as emotionless and less important. Which is immaturity, plain and simple, and is the fundamental aspect of human growth from child to adolescence to adult."

"Because as you become better at everything, as the innate skills actually manifest in reality, the bar rises for the next jump. The core demand for evolution is relentless, and respect, happiness, love and joy are irrevocably tied to it."

"Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering."

"The purest definition of "religious is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality."

“I look at the idea of rest as rotating one's qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy) for the same component all the time, of course it's going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don't use it at all.”

"The transitory and random quality of emotions ("Well, that's just the way I feel about it) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one's values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously-and a major theme in my own work over decades-the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this."

“My personal sense of presence that I kind of carry around with me is along the lines of ‘Somebody has to be there first before acting. The more one is there, the better the results in whatever you're doing—more precision, subtlety, relevance—and much less dispersion and depletion. When you watch someone who is good at this, you can sometimes feel like they're actually stretching out the walls of possibility in a given situation, literally creating open space. Much of this comes only through time and experience, eventual understanding that how one does something, not the specifics of action, is what impacts others most.’”

"Everyone claims to want the truth. If you really want it, I'd suggest investing seriously in humor and this mysterious skill of transforming bad news into good. Otherwise, you'll only get more frustrated."

"Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others."

"Transcendence is a word I don't use often; I prefer transformation. Why? Because the essential game is about using what is in front of you and in you exactly as it is, but finding a way to do something with that that is surprising and an expression of inspiration and intuition. You engage reality and make something out of it that only you can, alchemizing limitation, conflict or what appears to be bad into something else."

"The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change."

"The ability to remain constant, whole and playful, even while working technically, concentrating and upholding urgency, is essential to achieve a state of balance that will allow for this to happen. This has to come to life, and cannot stay just an idea or hope or intention or imitation, or ignored. The guarantee and proof that this balance and power is real is in its actualization. That is, that it manifests in functional reality. As in any intention, whether that be vague or specific, an ambition or desire, a goal or state of being, a question or hope, a curiosity or purpose, there exist natural and unnatural obstacles to its realization."

"Now, if you open the treasure chest of desire, what do you find there? What do all the desires have in common? You. Go ahead and stop here and test it for a few days if you are really serious about the question. After you get past the first thousand, you begin to enter into a subtle territory, known as the border between desire and yearning. Or, if you want, between answers and questions. The defining quality, or essence, of desire is that it is engaged as if it were an answer."

"Recent discoveries in developmental psychology and other behavioral disciplines have shown that babies are born with a "first draft of a moral mind. Among others, brain scientist, Gary Marcus, has described this moral understanding as "already defined and organized before experience. Evolutionary psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, describes this first draft of the moral mind as consisting of five primary values. Modern cross-cultural anthropologists point to these same five primary values as the foundation of all cultures, currently and historically, and 21st century ethologists suggest the same values apply to most if not all species."

"If you're ignoring a high percentage of the elements of your entire being, and the range of qualities they can naturally engage, there will be no real recovery or progress until you do. The typical relentless worker is just as lazy as the typical indulgent idler; they're both just going through the habitual motions. To break the repetitive pattern, and discover more energy and effectiveness, one simply must stretch out in all directions, rotating focus and application of the qualities that make up one's natural versatility."

"I think that as a species we've played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring."

"Think clearly here-desire does not produce fun, but yearning does. To identify the transition point between these two, look at desire as accumulating or consuming, and yearning as letting go of or giving. You don't collect truth or love, for example, you give them, and in the giving they come into being. And you have fun. Real fun, guilt-free fun, resentment-free fun, doubt-free fun; you experience and become the questions you engage-discipline and strength, imagination, independence, fearlessness, trust and freedom, knowledge, truth."

"There are some things that don't function as one would assume. For example, the impulse and linear thinking associated with the search for happiness most often produce questions like, "What's in it for me? or "How do I get what I want? Paradoxically, if you will, that very question pushes authentic happiness away. Now, to try to explain that to someone in such a way that they hear and are interested by the idea is going to probably involve some paradox and non-linearity."

"There's a tunnel between our external skill sets and our deepest longings and passions. People with the highest developed skills always know how to traverse that tunnel. That is, personal integration and wholeness - and consequent accomplishment and fulfillment - are largely about "enlightening the tool with the best we have in us. The tool could be anything - a voice or body, a musical instrument or paint brush, a trowel or computer. But skill is made up of capability, and that requires practiced familiarity over time with how to inject into the moment our unique talents, virtues and qualities."

"There's surprising relief and regeneration in finding ourselves within a moment of genuine grace, however small or temporary it may be."

"Mastery of anything is, more than anything else, the transformation of work into play. Giving orders and answers, never making mistakes, and having around you others with the opinion that you are great has nothing at all to do with it. Read carefully: to yearn for, to be compelled by, is being called to play."

"There are so many stereotypes, prepackaged concepts and platitudes out there in our thinking on the divine, and the associated emotions those produce; it's very difficult to transcend. But that's ultimately what experiencing the divine is all about: transcending stereotypes, concepts and platitudes. As soon as one falls back on an acceptable definition or understanding, it disappears. It's like water; the moment you try to grasp it, you lose it."

"Traditionally, true contemplation involves an act of devotion, wherein self-consciousness is removed by transferring consciousness onto the thing at hand. The better you perceive it, the less you observe yourself doing that. In other words, you could say that, at least for the extended moments of engaging it, you love it more than yourself."

"If your curiosity reaches a breaking point (compelled actually means that you only have the remaining choice to act on it, having tried all the other options before), and becomes fascination with mystery or truth, you find what you need. Maybe it's a person, maybe it's a tragedy, maybe it's an explosive recognition that, "My God, I'm still alive."

"If one follows what is in one's heart (let's leave out mind for the moment), one ends up with what one truly values and loves in life-and one acts accordingly. One's own private indulgent cyclic habitual reactive subjective transitory feelings are, hopefully, not at the head of that list."

"More focus has been placed on these subjects through human history than on anything else-mystery and mysticism, God, imagination, intuition, the nature of relationships, human purpose, happiness and salvation."

"It's misleading or deceptive in a way that such skills are learned like any other - simple practice, sincere investment over time. Yes, like small steps, one at a time, to cross the bridge. Just a single step today."

"In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose."

"Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation."

"As I've mentioned too often before, we are governed, and specifically our physicality is governed, by fairly strict rules, which are easily observable in nature. We have some freedom to manipulate some of these, but really not by very much. Everyone knows, or at least has the information, about the horrors of ignoring health issues and expecting your body to do what you want it to do with the least investment in it. Another "authority telling you what you should do is not the answer."

"Traditional stoicism, indifference to pleasure or pain, is a form of imposing conscience so as to block more immediate desires. The problem is that it eventually collapses on itself because natural emotional and physiological impulses are being ignored or repressed. To pass beyond that dichotomy-I want to eat ice cream, and yet I don't-requires conceiving and creating an integrated mind in which our passions and childlike impulses find expression through conscience. In other words, what we feel like doing and what we "should do become one and the same."

"The subjective experience of intense pain ("That's all I can take) corresponds exactly to one's subjective experience in relation to truth ("That's all I can take)."

"Love has an enormous spectrum of expression and impact. At the far end, it begins to unravel and move away from subjective experience and personal preference. It becomes pure intent, something that no longer tickles our desires, but fulfills the deeper needs of each circumstance we're in."

"A balanced diet is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else."

"There exists a direct link, or harmony, between the past, the present and the future. This has been misinterpreted, or exaggerated in both directions, either by the assumption that everything is random, or that there is already a predetermined destiny. There is an actual link, and there is a lot of mystery or room to play and invent."

"We live in a dimension where it is necessary to find a balance between wants and needs, or desires and yearning, or answers and questions. The totality of these makes up what we know as reality or truth, at least adolescent truth-facts. The fact of the matter is, you have to live in society one way or another, and there's a reason for that, so the base of engagement begins with acceptance of the variables as they actually are."

"Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it."

"Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn't going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell."

"It takes a relative amount of courage just to get out of bed each day. There are those who are stronger in their courage, and they help to compel us along a little further in the fulfillment of our faith."

"The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty."

"We all understand the value of sacrifice, even if that only involves setting aside dessert so as to lose weight, or putting money in the bank so as to later buy a house. Progress or achievement in any arena requires choices that often oppose what one feels like doing. The trick in truly succeeding with this in the long run is locating enough depth of feeling that the experience of conflicting desires dissolves. For that to happen, one has to learn how to think emotionally and physiologically."