David O. Russell Quotes

When you can take away the ego, you learn a lot about yourself and the world around you.

If you cannot bow to Buddha, you cannot be a Buddha. It is arrogance.

The biggest ego trip is getting rid of your ego, and of course the joke of it all is that your ego does not exist.

The Buddha is in me, the Buddha is in you. Live up to it.

Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

I've been practicing modalities of Eastern philosophy since about 1972. What I've learned through my meditation is a sense of equanimity, a sense of all things being equal.

We're still growing into that place of higher consciousness; we are becoming a global conscience. The idea is to unravel the onion and let go of the ego and evolve to that place where you perceive everything to be a beautiful experience rather than a daunting experience.

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

Music is not the only reason that I practice Buddhism anymore because it has affected my whole life.

Not being anxious requires a level of humility, doesn't it? It does, I think. It's not all about you.

Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?

By constantly keep one's attention on the Source, the ego is dissolved in that Source like a salt-doll in the sea.

The ego isn't wrong; it's just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don't take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn't personal. It isn't who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego.

To give up the world is to forget the ego, to know it not at all - living in the body, but not of it.

The expansion of your own consciousness, love capacity, humility and compassion - this is the path; this is the way.

The point of meditation is not merely to be an honest or good person in the conventional sense, trying only to maintain our security. We must begin to become compassionate and wise in the fundamental sense, open and relating to the world as it is.

When you accept everything for what it is without labels you are outside of your ego.

Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.

Only the ego resists egos. The spirit may notice egos, but sees beyond them and does not engage with them.

Is there a meditation that is not the ego trying to become? Is meditation conscious if every effort implies time?

To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion's roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

I work really hard at trying to see the big picture and not getting stuck in ego. I believe we're all put on this planet for a purpose, and we all have a different purpose... When you connect with that love and that compassion, that's when everything unfolds.

No one can be a yogi, maintaining a state of mental equilibrium, free from inner involvement in planned desireful activities, unless he has renounced identification with his ego and its unsatisfiable lust for the fruits of actions.