Talk Takeaways

To understand something completely means to realize it with your mind, heart and body.

Every true teaching points to the following fact in one way or another: Unless a person gives up his life, he will not find what his heart really wants.

"The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." The personality that is formed by the world and that forms the world it sees is currently the first. Your original essence is currently last. A reversal by way of a conscious exchange is necessary.

The punchline of the story about building sand castles close to the water on the beach was, "Let's build our castle where the waves won't wash it away."

Our problem is not the world we see. The problem and pain is the perceiver that sees the world the way that it does.

The punchline of the story about the man who disliked his lunch sandwich everyday, but who also turned out to make all of his own sandwiches: "If I don't make my own sandwich, what if I don't like it?" The man was a prisoner of his own choices.

The life that you have to lose is the one that makes choices and then resents its own choices.

The punchline of the story about the explorer who was fearful about what he might find: "If you don't know where you are going, how can you be disappointed with what you find?"

Freedom is realized the moment in which the observer and the observed are no longer separate.

The present moment does not begin somewhere, and it does not end anywhere. The thought-nature can only operate with an imagined beginning, in which there is no freedom, and an imagined end, where it will find the freedom it is seeking.

Thought can think about the present moment, but the present moment cannot be truly known by thought.

The process of negation involves seeing the end before you get there again, armed with the awareness that you have been down that familiar road of imagination many times before.

Repeating what you know only ensures that you will run into what you don't want again and again.

You enter into the unknown present moment only when you have finally expired the known.

Punchline of the story about the mountain climber: "If you have to die, let it at least be while you are climbing, rather than returning back to the known."

Life can't be understood by the mind that wants to understand it. But the mind can understand that.

The desperation to know, while a powerful sensation, is a form of death because it separates you from the life that cannot be known by the knower.

Real certainty is already built into creation itself. Trying to find certainty is futile because it is the activity of a consciousness that begins from uncertainty.

The solution is in the experience of yourself, not in what the self imagines it needs to experience in order to find freedom.