We're normally caught up in the current of our thinking, feelings and emotions. With awareness, we can observe it all without being swept away. This gives us access to something much vaster and deeper than our usual compressed minds. All of us can access this. It's not so difficult. With some instruction and practice, anybody can do it.

The Buddha himself said, "I still use conceptual thinking, but I'm not formed by it." And that's the Buddha.

We do have the precious opportunity of this human life.

Since I was a small child, I'd believed we were inherently perfect, and that we had to keep coming back again and again until we recognized our innate perfection.

In one way I would like to teach, but I have no qualifications to teach Westerners.

Every country that meets Buddhism molds it into their own indigenous religion, as America will. A very clear example of this is Japan, which threw out almost all the dharma, and just kept that essence, which spoke to them.

The nature of the mind is completely incredible.