18 Quotes by Robert A.F. Thurman

The world is what the individual makes it. A world of individuals is the intersubjective, collective mind field of all those individuals. Standing on the ground of freedom, we can see things afresh, enter relationships renewed and with a new purpose of sharing freedom and happiness. We can become poets and seers of reality. We can become great adepts, true individuals, agents of compassion. To live in a world is to be constantly creating that world. (p. 215)

The first two steps of the path: the recognition of the preciousness of human life, which is endowed with liberty and opportunity, and the awareness of the immediacy of death. (p. 79)

You yourself can be god. You really are that, in fact. You, yourself, are reality. You, yourself, are buddha. (p. 18)

Silence is the Buddha‘s greatest expression. It‘s the Buddha‘s great teaching, what the Hindus call „You are That“ in the Upanishads. „You are the ultimate reality. You are God!“ the Hindus boldly declare. But the Buddha‘s way of affirming that fact is by being silent, because if you are that, after all, if you are what the theists think is God, you already know it yourself. (p. 15)

Through the great bliss state, I myself become the mentor deity. From my luminous body, Light rays shine all around, Massively blessing beings and things, Making the universe pure and fabulous, Perfection in its every quality.(p. 10)

There is no need for you to formally promote certain doctrines: your very presence becomes a teaching example to others, a liberating art that opens their imagination to the potential freedom they also can experience. (p. 79)

How are you going to experience bliss and voidness, wisdom and compassion, if you are a rigid, independent self? You can't enter into the ideal universe, the „buddhaverse“ as I like to call it, of enjoyment, wisdom, and compassion, until you first detach from this world of suffering, this prison that is the fixed and absolute self-image. (p. 67)

When you become aware of your selflessness, you realize that any way you feel yourself to be at any time is just a relational, changing construction. When that happens, you have a huge inner release of compassion. Your inner creativity about your living self is energized, and your infinite life becomes your ongoing work of art. (p. 54)

Great dangers stalk the globe—the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and death. There is no mystery about them. They are self-fulfilling prophecies. Joyous, transcendent creativity expresses itself in the positive vision that is the key to defeat the general that commands the four horsemen—despair itself. Trust, hope, and creativity can defeat the horsemen. We must not just call for them. We must develop them step-by-step.