I started to meditate formally at about 18. I would sit on a mountaintop in Southern California around twilight and focus on my third eye. Everything would become still and rings of light would appear, and I'd go through them. I would be beyond time and space.

You have to come to the world of enlightenment with open hands, not clinched fists, without an agenda.

The emphasis is on meditation in Tantric Zen. The experience of meditation in formal practice, zazen, where you're sitting down and meditating and concentrating.

How do you deal with meditating when you stop breathing? The trick is to meditate just a little higher and you won't even know that you're not breathing.

Meditation gives you personal power. You will notice that people will treat you differently as you progress because they can feel that power. Use that power wisely. If you search your heart, I think you will.

Honesty, I went through terrible, terrible times where I just took myself over the coals. I thought I must be the most impure person in the world ... but because that is reverse egotism, I thought I must be the second most impure person in the world.

I don't think of myself as a guru but as a teacher. If one means 'guru' in the original sense a 'dispeller of darkness' then that certainly is my purpose.