Enlightenment requires discipline, balance, knowledge, power, happiness and a sense of responsibility and sacrifice, being able to do things with your life that you would not have done otherwise.

In the dead world of the Western mind all that is seen are shades of gray. There's a cloud over every experience. There's no possibility of divine incarnation, divine intervention, let alone that one's self in every moment is divine.

Reincarnation doesn't simply mean that at the end of this life you will move on to another life in another body, it means that the spirit of life is continually renewing itself and moving to a higher level.

Buddhism suggests there are no elect. Everything rests upon your own self-effort, which is the good news because that means you don't have to wait around for some nebulous God to help you.

Deluded beings think that if they get in a battle with a Zen Master or with a Don Juan, that it's going enhance their life if they win. You can never take power from someone else any more than you can take sunlight.

Balance is the ability to be happy in the midst of the most chaotic or even boring or transient circumstance.

The wheel goes round and round and round forever. Pleasure, pain, birth and death, lifetime after lifetime, it is endless. All sentient beings experience this, the endless dance of life, the lila.