I consider those persons to be my students who come and meditate with me on a regular basis, who, in spite of the hardships and difficulties on the path of knowledge, still continue to try, and who respect me as I respect them.

You have to be courageous in life to allow a lightness to engage your being. It is easy to be a jerk. To be unhappy with all this weird stuff around us just seems to me to be such a waste. That's a jerk.

Everyone experiences desire. Desire is not bad. There is no good or bad from the point of view of karma. There is only structured reaction.

When you experience the light, voila, you're happy. The very nature of the light is happiness. You don't have to do anything or be anybody special.

Meditation is like taking a shower. You are going to wash all the dirt off that you have picked up since your last shower and be clean.

Everyone is afraid of enlightenment, knowledge, completion. People are afraid of being exposed.

I select people to work more closely when they are prepared to and I see that. They don't have to tell me. I know. I will give them a task of some type, and that task becomes the koan between us.