‘Don’t wait for it,’ I said. ‘Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live opened up to me.’

You have to decide right now to be free once and for all. Everyone who has found freedom in this lifetime has had to make this decision.

Spiritual awakening doesn’t happen because you master some spiritual technique. There are lots of skillful meditators who are not awake. Awakening happens when you stop bullshitting yourself into continual nonawakening. It’s very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality.

At least once in your life, when you need to reset, pick a handful of places 4 to 8 hours away in every direction. Put them in a hat, get in the car, pull a name, and drive there. No questions asked.

You must die in order to live; you must melt down to shape anew. You must destroy to build, annihilate before creation. The Supreme is the universal solvent, it corrodes every container, it burns through every obstacle. Without the absolute denial of everything, the tyranny of things will be absolute. The Supreme is the great harmonizer, the guarantee of the ultimate and perfect balance – of life in freedom. It dissolves you and thus re-asserts your true being.

The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

Anyone can love a rose, but it takes a great deal to love a leaf. It’s ordinary to love the beautiful, but it’s beautiful to love the ordinary.

Growth is not a steady, forward, upward progression. It is indeed a switchback trail: three steps forward, two back, one around the bushes, and a few simply standing, before another forward leap.