Psychic development makes you strong. It develops a common sense attitude in which you don't expose yourself to forces, people and situations that would drain you.

Focusing on an enlightened teacher is a doorway. It is not a person. We are focusing on the light that passes through them. We are moving through them into the planes of light and eventually to nirvana.

Make lists. Write down the things that give you power. Write down the things that take your power away also. Make lists of people close to you. Are you associations raising you to a higher level of attention?

It doesn't matter what your work really is. It is exciting to do well at something. It empowers you.

Self-knowledge, I guess, is hard. But I think pain is harder, personally. I think to be hopeless is very hard. I think to die without hope or to live without hope is very hard.

Life is beautiful all of the time. Just to be alive and perceive that beauty of life all around you and within you is the best that there is.

In the West, we think of sports and athletics as individual achievement, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; it all revolves around the ego. This has nothing to do with the Zen of sports and athletics.