You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you
A disciple said to him, "I am ready, in the quest for God , to give up anything: wealth, friends, family, country, life itself. What else can a person give up?" The Master calmly replied, "One's beliefs about God.
I myself have never been concerned with whether we are considered known or unknown. It's no problem of ours.
I have no ego investment in being on the air. I don't knock others for whom that kind of attention is like oxygen, but I don't miss anything about it.
I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I'm done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what's really going on here. That usually softens things.
I understand now that my soul is my power, not perfection or my ego. I continue to teach this to my children, despite their glamorous careers. If we can maintain our core values, the exteriors take second place and become a gift, a source of gratitude.
In this way the ego detaches itself from the external world. It is more correct to say: Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling - a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.
Just a little detachment from the ego is needed.
When I watch myself on camera, in any capacity - being interviewed, performing, 20 years ago or yesterday - there's a part of me that really doesn't grasp that it's me.
When you are completely identified with your thinking mind you are totally separate from everything else in the universe.
Only when you stop identifying yourself with things that are not you, the possibility of knowing the nature of your existence arises.
I'd like to lose interest in myself.
Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life.
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.
Stop attaching so much weight to being right. In the grand scheme of things, being right is insignificant compared with being happy.
I've stopped taking myself seriously because now I understand how fickle my thoughts are.
What do you want to do sadhana for? The aim should not be the satisfaction of egoism: "I want to be a great yogi; I shall have so much power and with that power I shall establish myself in the world." All such thoughts must be thrown far away.
For spiritual teachers, it is important not to identify with the image people inevitably have of them.
In order to reach home, where you have the guidance of cosmic insight, you must first depart from your present location. You cannot remain in the noisy city of your own vanities and expect to know what to do. Cosmic knowledge and personal vanity do not mingle.
Being a songwriter, you are accepting that this isn't about you. If you do want it to be about you, you're going to be really miserable.
I love acting. It's my playground; it lets me explore. But my happiness in this world, my level of peace, is never going to be dictated by acting. My goal in life is to detach from the egoic mind.
A warrior doesn't know remorse for anything he has done, because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self.
