Purity is something that can be consciously developed. Expect to have impure moments, thoughts, and ideas. One day they will go away, and then there will be happiness.
Become conscious of what you think during the day. A negative thought will enter you. At first it will be vague, innocuous, but then it will root in your consciousness and soon it will be impossible to eradicate.
Don’t condemn yourself – that only increases the hold of impurity. Accept your limitations but know that you’re working towards changing them.
Be willing to laugh at your humanness and at your divinity.
Don’t be offended by your lack of purity. Purity is a seed that will grow and develop.
None of this is real. All of this is an illusion and your acceptance of that fact is the beginning of the pathway to self-knowledge.
Everything that you are or conceive of yourself as being is just an idea. It’s an illusion. It’s a hallucination.
We were never there to begin with. What we are, or conceive of ourselves as, is a perception.
We are everything and we are nothing. We are a forgotten moment. We don’t even exist, which is the freeing part. We just think we do. That’s the illusion.
There is no self, yet we all exist. All phenomena are “empty,” yet they have Buddha nature.
You’re a part of me. I’m a part of you and we are all a part of this great nothingness.
The way you become happy is by realizing that there is no self. No self at all, not a silly millimeter of self. You don’t exist. When you know this, you will be happy.
On the pathway that leads to enlightenment, only your heart can tell you what is right.
Being on the path means we again meditate with joy. We deal with the suffering of life and the pain of existence without perfect enlightenment with a smile.
We could go to monasteries. I could show you people who are very wise and they have great willpower, but they’re not happy. They lack balance. They take it all too seriously.
In Buddhism balance is the most difficult thing, because it is overlooked.
Don’t think of us as separate beings. Imagine that we are one body and it’s been split into millions. When we sit in the mediation hall – that is unity.
You human beings think that yoga is in some way going to make everything you want to happen, work out. You are going to be able to avoid what you don’t want. That is not yoga. That is desire and aversion.
Intentional suffering and the postponement of happiness is not yoga or Buddhism. It will not lead to a better incarnation.
Don’t create a plastic image of what it is to be spiritual and try to become it. You won’t be capable of it and that will frustrate you. Even if you could do it, if it’s not really what you’re like, you’ll be miserable.