This moment in which you experience stillness is every moment. Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.
What am I, really? The beautiful thing...is nobody can tell us what we are. Nobody can really tell us. Not in a way that's going to be satisfactory to us. Our true nature is self-authenticating. When we bump into our true nature, it authenticates itself. Something inside us knows. This...is what has been sought for, longed for, looked for. This is it. Usually, it's not what we expected.
Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That's the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart.
Many spiritual people are involved in a radical denial of what is happening. They want to transcend it, get rid of it, get out of it, get away from it. There's nothing wrong with that feeling, but the approach doesn't work because it's escapism in spiritual clothing. It's wearing spiritual clothing and spiritual concepts, but it is really no different than a drunk in the gutter who doesn't want to feel the pain anymore. When you abide and accept everything completely and fully, you automatically go beyond.
True sincerity reveals a powerful form of clarity and discernment that is necessary in order to perceive yourself honestly without flinching or being held captive by your conditioned mind's judgments and defensiveness.
Spirituality does not require that you work hard toward achieving a result in the future as much as it requires you to be fully present, sincere and committed now, with absolute honesty and willingness to uncover and let go of any illusions that come between you and the realization of Reality.
Suffering is how Life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true. It is the way Life suggests that you are not in harmony with what is.
Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don't go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.
The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things. We don't come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don't come to clarity by avoiding confusion.
Our illusions-the beliefs we hold on to-are the very doorways to our freedom. We simply have to enter through them without grasping or pushing away. We must not believe them, but we must not run away from them either. We need to see each moment of apparent bondage as an invitation to freedom. Then it becomes an act of love, an act of compassion, to stop running away.
Only something as insane as human beings would ever asked themselves if 'I'm good.' You don't find oak trees having existential crisis. 'I feel so rotten about myself. I don't produce as much acorns as the one next to me.'
Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace.
It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living.