Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.

Through meditation one has to achieve a dreamless sleep with full alertness. Once this happens, the drop falls into the ocean and becomes the ocean.

Death is the greatest illusion of all.

Love can never possess. Love is giving freedom to the other. Love is an unconditional gift, it is not a bargain.

This watchfulness, this witnessing is the ultimate secret of creating a religious life, of creating a life of transcendence, a life of spirituality, of enlightenment, of buddhahood.

While one is asleep one cannot do anything that is good. Virtue is impossible in unconsciousness, only sin is possible. Unconsciousness is the source of sin.

Wakefulness is the only saintliness there is, and sleepiness, unconsciousness, is the only sin there is; all other sins are born out of it. Cut the root, cut the very root! Don't go on pruning the leaves.