The Zen Master was constantly attempting to break up concepts that people had about what it was like to be a spiritual teacher. We have a traditional image. Each Zen master was a complete character.
It's not what you do that matters. It's not what you say. There's nothing that is not holy or spiritual. Be beyond definition, beyond categorization, be absorbed.
Be radical! The reason you feel so miserable is because you put spirituality in a form. You boxed it, franchised it. You decided spirituality was a certain way but then you got stuck in the way.
Tantra and adventure are very, very connected. Perhaps the greatest enemy for one who's journeying along the spiritual path is complacency.
Tantra is spiritual, not religious. It deals with the spirit. Religion is just an applied body of doctrines that's believed or not believed by one or more individuals. Spirituality is the science of metaphysics.
We have a spiritual community but everyone lives where they want to. I recommend certain areas to live because of their power.
Today in the west the word 'guru' has come to mean someone who leads a cult, someone who deprives others of their intellectual or spiritual freedom and rips them off financially.
I know some teachers say that you shouldn't display the psychic powers and other powers referred to as the siddhas, but as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't really matter. There are no absolute rights or wrongs in spiritual practice
It's very funny. People do not want to achieve liberation or be happy. This is the basic guideline they teach you in Spiritual Training School.
Many spiritual teachers have done this. They have disbanded their whole community because everyone got angry. The karma, at a certain point, has to go back to the person; it's intensified and hurts them spiritually.
So I went off on my own and started the process of spiritual teaching.
At a certain point I left my spiritual teacher because I began to see the limitations of my teacher, who was a very powerful occultist, but who I thought was, to some extent, limiting others in their spiritual growth.
I went through times of self-hate, thinking how undeveloped spiritual I was. Everyone else in the ashram, a thousand people, nobody had a girlfriend or boyfriend. I did.
Some of the most exalted states of consciousness I experienced were in bed with someone, alone, or with my spiritual teacher. There was never a difference for me.
I entered a spiritual community when I was 20, which I was in for 11 year, with very strict meditative practices, with an Eastern teacher. It was very much like a religious order.
I meditated on my own for some time, read spiritual books, became a vegetarian and had incredible experiences every day, every meditation, where I was just thrown into the infinite - never realizing that other people didn't necessarily have those experiences in meditation that quickly.
It's not what you do - it's the intensity of your feeling that determines how far you go in the spiritual life.
Zen is the fastest method I know of, aside from mysticism, of dissolving the fixations people have about spiritual practice and themselves.
If you think of spiritual practice as unpleasant work - it is not spiritual practice as I know it.
Selfliss giving rounds the edges in spiritual practice. Many people can meditate very well but they're still very egotistical.
You can tell a person's level of spiritual devlopment simply by watching how much they give.
If you burn yourself out in two years of intense selfless giving, what good is that if you could have given 20 years? Set yourself up well. Get the things you want - God exists in the material and in the spiritual.
Your spiritual journey and your spiritual welfare are really dependent on two primary factors: One, your ability to meditate and two, your ability to give of yourself.
Only real love of the infinite will motivate you. While pain motivates, once we feel comfortable and the pain has stopped, we'll stop evolving. Love is a far superior spiritual vehicle.
They have done this through sexual repression, economic repression, political repression, social repression, ideological repression and spiritual repression.
