While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware — not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here & now.

Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings.

Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, or unconditional friendliness, a simple, direct relationship with the way we are.

Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the "self"—the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one's head—is an illusion.

Meditation is a way of scientifically looking at our basic situation and seeing what is important in dealing with it.

In meditation one is just One. One becomes the Self. The method of meditation is only a process by which this is made possible.

Meditation is a way for nourishing and blossoming the divinity within you.

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.

What is meditation?... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk.

Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself.

Through meditation we become aware of our fundamental unity with all things. We cannot attain that awareness by reading books or listening to lectures. We can attain it only through direct experience. To have that experience we must pass from one state of awareness to another, moving gradually to deeper and deeper levels of our being.

The thing about meditation is: You become more and more you.