I was initiated as a Buddhist monk at the age of 19, but I think that initiation is simply a starting point.

A surfer is poised on a wave on his board, cutting quickly to the left. He'll always be there, in that moment. He's never left it. He had no birth, he didn't go to school, he didn't purchase the board; none of those things ever were.

Meditation is the pathway to enlightenment, and I would encourage you to follow that pathway as far as you can, into ecstasy.

Through incarnations, some beings do go down. That is to say, they forget. The soul falls into an eclipse of itself and there is a downward progression for a time.

I went through times of self-hate, thinking how undeveloped spiritual I was. Everyone else in the ashram, a thousand people, nobody had a girlfriend or boyfriend. I did.

Who has that absolute trust, to fling yourself into mortality, to let it do with you as it will, with all the permutations and possibilities of as it will, be it horror or ecstasy or boredom?

With free will, we can modify, to a certain extent the chain of karma that has been set in motion by the karma of the previous moment. That is what free will really is, the ability to alter the sequence of karmic fate.