It’s either illusion or delusion. Illusion is when you cry at the movie. Delusion is when you throw your shoe at the screen.

The trick is to be in it and not of it. You walk in to do your job or whatever but the thing doesn’t define you. You are not your actions, but something deeper. If you’re a Jew first and a human second, you’ve lost the humanity. If you define yourself by what you do, you lose what you are. If a fireman came in here right now with his outfit and his axe, chopping through the door even though there’s no fire, we’d say hey man, take it easy. There ain’t no fire here. Put down the axe. Have a date. Let’s talk about it.

Discovery that you don’t know shit is the doorway of perception. It’s right next to grief and hurt as the doorway of perception.

Death is actually the permanent state, life impermanence. Life is small flash, it happens and is gone.

The life of inquiry has a fretful relationship with an organized scene. Religion is an attempt to organize chaos, but the religious urge is chaotic. Religion is a take on the energy, on the mystery, but it’s a projection, not the mystery itself. When you converse with the energy directly, religion falls away.

The heartbreak is there from the beginning, the deep pain, the undeniable, ripping pain. You’d never go there for any reason, but you agree to go there for love. Relationships force us to this deep place.

So I see that to be alive is to be alert, always. To be alive is not to fix myself up in any role, but to see how everything applies.

Only when our ideas die is there the opportunity for something else to grow. To me love is this constant death and renewal. To me enquiry, living, breathing, is the exhalation that allows the inhalation. And living is to die to the past–not to negate it or get rid of it or run away from it, but to see that it doesn’t apply. In order to fully look, one needs that intensity, that passion.

There is no animal on this earth that doesn’t know what to eat and has to learn about its own diet. But humankind, with all its concepts of diets, is still searching for the right way to eat. We must go to dance class or yoga class or tai chi to try to discover grace. But can we see that we have graced to begin with and we lost it?

Through a certain intensity the snake goes up the spine, reaches the lover and they become united. To me this simply means that the mind and body unite—that there's no separation. And this happens when there's a regard for life, when one takes a look. And when one is looking inwardly, one is looking outwardly also; there is no separation.

Are you prepared to simply look at the fundamentals of your life? Life is available to anyone who feels the need to live, that’s all. The mystery of life is to be discovered.

Can we look at life without the past interfering, can we look at life without all the authorities indicating how we should look?