When will you begin to exist then? When will you begin to be here, to live? Regardless.

When are you going to let yourself descend from your lofty preoccupations, and simply land where you are?

Love, compassion, kindness, and generosity change their function from being motivations for practice to becoming expressions of realization.

Practice is the interest, the love, the drive, the tendency, the movement, to be as authentic as possible, to be as real as possible.

Sometimes being real means allowing pain or accepting a painful truth. Yet something in us aligns with an inner ground of authenticity when we are real. We love it because of its inherent rightness in our soul, the sense of “Aha, here I am and there is nothing to do but be.

Your environment wasn’t supportive, wasn’t loving, did not respond to you... The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is not that there was no love or support. The greater calamity, which is caused by the first calamity is that you lost the connection to your essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not.

You abandon yourself, then start looking for satisfaction. You.

One cannot seek happiness, for it is the result of realizing the Truth. The personality, which has security and pleasure as its aims, cannot be happy. Pursuing pleasure or safety will entail covering up any unpleasant or frightening truths. This automatically closes Joy. For Joy is the radiance of the heart when Truth is appreciated.

When we blend courage and compassion, assertiveness and gentleness, our essential strength and kindness support us in being where we are.

If we are to reach certainty and true autonomy of realization, we need to be willing to be heretics. What’s more, we need to become universal heretics, not believing anything that we do not know from direct experience, beyond stories, beyond hearsay, and even beyond the mind.