Our spiritual work is to bit by bit discover natural limitations in the thought process.

What has happened in the world today is that human beings have had life replaced with the concept of living. In the concept of living there is not life, because all concepts are merely ideas. We have become a race of beings that literally try to extract our sense of self, our life, from ideas.  No idea has life! All concepts are a form of self-reflection.

I hope that one day, right in the middle, or right after you have bestowed on someone the magnificence of your understanding, you see that what you just did was rob them blind instead of giving them what they asked for. Maybe all they wanted to do was tell you about their problem… but what you wanted to do was tell them about what you understood. There’s nothing in that. That’s a concept that you’ve given.

The spiritual life is about wiping away concepts. Only the light of truth can begin to make a man or a woman stop seeing through the way he or she thinks. Stop thinking and start seeing. Don’t be afraid of what you see, because if you’ll stay there long enough, the light that comes down will show you that you don’t have to be what you thought you had to be. What you will see is all that is keeping you from being all that you can be.

You can have a real life, but you have to do the work.