When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.

Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.

Notice that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them over and over again, wounding us deeply. Almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) of the mind, which is why so many people become fearful, hate-filled, and wrapped around their negative commentaries. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is actually an oxymoron. When you're in your mind, you're hardly ever at peace, and when you're at peace, you're never only in your mind.

There is nothing to prove and nothing to protect. I am who I am and it's enough.

The school of relationships is where you learn self-knowledge. I just don't know how you could learn it sitting alone in the desert on a rock by yourself. You have to see where you fail at it. And that confrontation with your own ability - "I was again not able to love" - those are the teachable moments.

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

There are three things we have to let go of. The first is the compulsion to be successful. Second, is the compulsion to be right-especially theologically right. (That's merely an ego trip, and because of this "need" churches split in half, with both parties prisoners of their own egos.) Finally, there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control.