The cosmic humor is that if you desire to move mountains and you continue to purify yourself, ultimately you will arrive at the place where you are able to move mountains. But in order to arrive at this position of power you will have had to give up being he-who-wanted-to-move-mountains so that you can be he-who-put-the-mountain-there-in-the-first-place. The humor is that finally when you have the power to move the mountain, you are the person who placed it there--so there the mountain stays.

You may have expected that enlightenment would come ZAP! instantaneous and permanent.This is unlikely.After the first ah ha expereince, it can be thougth of as a thinning of a layer of clouds.

A Tibetan Lama said to me, "The best place to stand, Ram Dass, is halfway between hope and hopelessness." So I can write a scenario for the 21st century in either direction. One is that it all goes to hell and that it's truly the dark age.

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

When you look back at your own life, you see ... the sufferings you went through, each time you would have avoided it if you possibly could. And yet, when you look at the depth of your character now, isn't a part of that a product of those experiences? Weren't those experiences part of what created the depth of your inner being?

Suffering brings your heart to bear. It gets you where you are!