Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves.

Freedom is now or never.

When your child is very young, you must protect him from doing harm to himself and others, then later by precept, explaining to him what is going to be for his eventual happiness.

Introspection is self-improvement and therefore introspection is self-centeredness. Awareness is not self-improvement. On the contrary, it is the ending of the self, of the “I,” with all its peculiar idiosyncrasies, memories, demands, and pursuits. In introspection there is identification and condemnation. In awareness there is no condemnation or identification; therefore, there is no self-improvement. There is a vast difference between the two.

Those who play a safe game die very safely.

If you set out to meditate, it will not be meditation. If you set out to be good, goodness will never flower.

Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure and the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes unsought and uninvited. Once it is there, though you may live in the world with all its noise, pleasure and brutality, they will not touch that mind.