It’s a very complicated matter to become enlightened. If it happens to a person without a teacher in this lifetime, you can bet their boots, they’ve had about a thousand teachers in their last thousand lives because it’s a very complicated thing to do.
If you become very close to your teacher, if you do well in your meditation, a deep emotional bond will develop between both of you over a period of time. You can be thousands of miles away from your teacher and find that induction is always taking place. That’s the ideal.
If you respect your teacher, you do better. Respect is only good because it will help you. Real liberated people, what can you do for them? They’ve got everything. They are everything. They don’t need to be worshipped or adored.
A teacher will have an initial contact at some point with someone. It happens inwardly first. Before you ever meet an advanced teacher, they have somehow traveled inwardly along the astral planes.
It’s up to you to avail yourself to knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t need you. The idea of a compassionate God was formulated, obviously, by someone who didn’t want to do any work.
Power itself is simply a word to describe attention, awareness, which embodies all things.
People over-focus on teachers as an excuse to avoid their own life, and that way they fail to take responsibility for themselves. They have this feeling that the teacher will just take care of them.
Emotional control is essential for attaining higher levels of mind. The thing that the teacher looks for in a student is the degree of self-control, not coldness that someone has.
If someone is in the same state of mind and doesn’t seek to block your success, you have a friend. Such friends are rare, and if you find such a friend, value them.
You have to come to the world of enlightenment with open hands, not clinched fists, without an agenda.
An enlightened teacher simply expresses enlightenment in their life by living. It is the student’s job to gain the teachings. The teacher’s job is just to be perfectly enlightened.
In America people have this funny idea about enlightenment and money. Money expresses a level of commitment. Studying enlightenment is like going to a university.
In the esoteric teachings, a transference process takes place between teacher and student where knowledge is actually transmitted from one to the other. This requires that the student be receptive.
Without balance and wisdom, power becomes very destructive. It creates unhappiness and not happiness. To simply see a teacher to gain power is a mistake.
You are a part of everything. You are like the guys in the bar and that gal on the corner with the red dress. We are a little bit of everyone. Let’s not get too fancy here.
Faithfulness, faith, all of the words that so few people live, you must live. Only then are you worthy of immortality.
You must be accommodating with your teacher. You must have a sense of humor about your teacher and the impossible things they ask you to do.
Self-honesty is absolutely necessary in the practice of Buddhism.
The purpose of enlightenment is certainly not the teacher, nor is it you. It doesn’t have a purpose. Enlightenment simply exists.
We’ve decided what we are. That’s the dream. When the dream fades, it’s not that we don’t exist. How could we not exist since we never existed?