Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life

Stillness, in its most spontaneous and authentic sense, is a state of nonresistance. It is not stillness in the conventional sense of non-movement, but in the sense of non-interference by the ego-self.

By contemplate I mean to identify exactly what fears are driving you. What assumptions are they based on? What are you running from? Rampant thinking is also your mind looking for peace—as if you could think enough or understand enough that your mind could be at peace. But the mind never thinks its way to a lasting peace. In fact, in the mind’s rus

As you say, the ego cannot make awakening or redeeming love happen, but you have never really been that small, limiting idea called ego. Relax into your being—that is the fundamental practice. Who are you beyond being worthy or unworthy? Let all self-image transform into loving presence.

Whatever the core story is, it is the story (the conclusion) that colors all of our other stories. And like all stories, it covers up the void at the core of the ego structure, the void being our point of connection with the infinite. The ego sees this void as threatening because it provides the way out of the ego structure, which is terrifying to

Even to wish you had no thoughts is still a thought. Imagine that the presence or absence of thoughts means nothing, is of no importance at all. You are not those thoughts. As soon as you allow thoughts to be there, they will have no power to bother you. It is your resistance to and indulgence in thought that creates so many thoughts.

The problem is that behind both of these masks lies not another or better or more spiritual mask, but the direct experience of no mask. And the direct experience of no mask is something that most people avoid with great resolve, because the familiar and morbid comfort of a known identity is preferable to being stripped down to our unknown radiance.

When you meet the fear of the ephemeral nature of existence, you are also meeting with the uncontrollability of life. You cannot control the transient nature of existence, so don’t try to meet fear from the “me” because then you only have more fear. Meet fear from love, because love can acknowledge transience as well as the fact that you cannot con

Someone in a state of great suffering will naturally want to change their emotional state, but this is different from wanting to change your essential human self. Wanting to change your essential human self is an act of violence. Not wanting to suffer is understandable and natural, but not wanting to be you is violent. I may be overstating the case

As you know, each opening up of a new vista of our conscious being can bring up experiences of ever-deepening freedom and revelation, as well as experiences of fear and trepidation. All revelation opens new dimensions of the unconscious—dimensions of experience that themselves are seeking to be liberated from isolated separation and welcomed into t