“The great Theravadan monk Ajahn Chah used to teach that the whole worl...” — Stephen Cope Quote

“The great Theravadan monk Ajahn Chah used to teach that the whole world is teaching the dharma (the truth) to us all the time. . . . In order to hear the teaching, we must slow down, cultivate awareness, and tune in. Most of all, we have to drop our hopes and dreams and preconceived notions of how it should be. We must look at how it is. We must look with a mind that lets go. Then we will see.”

“….[O]ur lives only make sense when understood as a sacred quest for the true self. The practices of yoga. . . are organized around the belief that all humans have the innate capacity and longing to mature to full aliveness, that all humans are born with the seed of the awake, conscious mind. . . . [W]hen we finally commit to the quest for the true self, we will discover that we are not alone on our journey. One day, to our astonishment, we will find that the true self for which we are searching is also searching for us.”

“Love is at the core of all true dharma. The enactment of our vocation in the world stands in the stream of love that flows from the divine Self to the individual soul.”

“Now we have become exclusively identified with our physical bodies, with our possessions, with our thoughts, with our personalities. We think we’re our ideas, our careers, our families, our countries. We live our lives in utter ignorance of the vastness of our real nature, estranged from our true selves. This is the source of our suffering. . . .”

“People turn to meditation because they want to make good decisions, break bad habits & bounce back better from disappointments.”

“I understand once again that the greatness of God always reveals itself in the simple things.”

“And for the sake of humility--a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves.”

“When we spread ourselves too thin, we then need to pull ourselves together afterwards.”

“Whether we eat, sleep, work, play, whatever we do life contains dissatisfaction, pain. If we enjoy pleasure, we are afraid to lose it; we strive for more and more pleasure or try to contain it. If we suffer pain we want to escape it. We experience dissatisfaction all the time. All activities contain dissatisfaction or pain, continuously.”

“Waking up consciousness isn’t like joining a club. Nor is spiritual discernment accomplished through hero worship. Instead, your most effective leadership will involve gently reminding individual humans that they can trust the truth within themselves. Then you’ll encourage them to seek authentic teachers who possess that quintessential human attribute, caring.”