Aphorisms

  • A pleaser avoids conflict only to end up creating it. What you run from, you run into.
  • There’s a difference between standing up for yourself and indulging your desires.
  • You are who and what you complain about.
  • Your value is not in what you do but in who you are.
  • It’s the job of inferior people to keep superior people in their place.
  • The way to be superior is to be equal.
  • The way to always be right is to admit when you’re wrong.
  • God as concept is limited; God as experience is limitless.
  • Love’s only condition is unconditional.
  • Live within and enjoy the world.
  • If we are in harmony with the ego, we are out of sync with reality.
  • Look within. It’s the only way out.
  • Deception is nobody’s friend. Has it ever worked for you?
  • Grown-ups are people pretending to be adults.
  • Narcissism is when people look outside themselves into their minds for happiness.
  • Go into the darkness and the darkness is dissolved.
  • Bring into harmony how you feel about yourself, how you think you come across, and how others perceive you.
  • Keep the mind quiet so you can hear what God says.
  • Deep secrets make our alienation special.
  • Withheld communication is louder than silence.
  • “I love you. I don’t have to be good to you. Why should I treat you any better than I treat myself?”
  • Divestment of attention is not divestment of responsibility.
  • No matter how many times you’ve been born, someday you have to grow up.
  • Guilt is the acceptable alternative to unacceptable feelings.
  • Destiny can’t change, but your attitude can.
  • Enthusiasm is a fair-weather friend.
  • Surrender to God is a sign of strength, not weakness.
  • Surrender to God does not rob us of personality or vitality.
  • To look within your heart and out at the world is to see as God sees.
  • One hundred percent (fe)male is only fifty percent human.
  • Discipline is the vessel from which all creativity pours.
  • Insights and breakthroughs are like seeds: unplanted, they bear no fruit.
  • Romance is the invitation to relationship, not the goal.
  • Romance is how grown-ups play make-believe.
  • The path to God is long, arduous, and joyful; the path to personal power is short, fast, and deadly.
  • Shoveling the dirt out of the mind lightens the load of the heart.
  • The mind has a mind of its own that has a mind of its own that has a mind of its own.
  • A calm ocean lies beyond the storm of boredom.
  • The real world is wherever you are real.
  • Our world is a reflection of our inner condition.
  • Are you persuaded by substance or delivery?
  • Trusting words alone and not the experience behind them brings disaster.
  • The mind thinks, the intellect decides, the ego identifies with the decision.
  • To be effective tools, the mind and body should be relaxed, efficient, and agile.
  • Only when the mind loses control of you can you gain control of it.
  • The way to be special is to be honest.
  • The degree to which life works is the degree to which we are honest.
  • Discrimination and discernment are judgment purified.
  • To love with respect is to love without attachment.
  • Respect yourself and respect from others will follow.
  • I am, therefore I can think.
  • Everything in you is in the others; everything in the others is in you.
  • There is nowhere where spiritual growth is not possible.
  • Clean up the outside by first cleaning up the inside.
  • Sentiments are of the mind; true feelings are of the heart.
  • Do you love others or your concept of others?
  • Self-effort is an insistence on being fully present to the Reality of the moment.
  • Real change happens only with surrender to God, because only God is real.
  • Be a nobody, and only the true are with you. Be humble and you’ll be free.
  • Simple is not dumb.
  • Rebel against your wrong understanding, not against Reality.
  • It defies reason that an unreasonable proposition, reasonably expressed, is received as reasonable.
  • A reasonable proposition, unreasonably expressed, is still reasonable, though unreceived.
  • We are responsible for speaking out, not for whether others hear what we say.
  • Repentance is not guilt. It is awakening.
  • In the power plays within a pair, the one who initiates contact is inferior.
  • If need equals love, then love thrives on incompetence.
  • The goal is to continue to love the process.
  • When you’re in your mind, you can’t use your intellect.
  • Being cut off from your feelings makes us behave irrationally.
  • “Your life doesn’t exist when I’m not there.”
  • You take your problems with you, so why go anywhere?
  • The spark of ego gets mistaken for the spark of freedom.
  • Silence is not always peace, and peace is not always silent.
  • Compassion is love with detachment.
  • Dispassion is detachment with compassion.
  • Don’t fix people. Encourage people to fix themselves.
  • If I weren’t worthless, I’d be a nothing.
  • “My needs are sincere; others’ are selfish.”
  • Lying is not conflict resolution.
  • “I thought it, so you must have heard it.”
  • “Positive feelings” are those that do not challenge or threaten your limited sense of self.
  • Ego and pretense are mistaken for intelligence.
  • “Being egotistical is okay, as long as it’s unconscious.”
  • Will others like you more if you like you less?
  • Cult + your = culture.
  • Do you feel like a winner only when there is a loser?
  • Relating from the mind is win/lose; relating from the heart is win/win.
  • To give up failure, you have to give up success.
  • The nurtured soul brings fulfillment; the nurtured ego, abuse.
  • People in pain win the dependency game.
  • Low and high self-esteem are both egotistical.
  • Nice is a euphemism for victim.
  • Putting up with something is not forgiveness.
  • For a victim, pity is the surrogate of love.
  • Discipline from the ego is behavior modification. Discipline from the heart is personal transformation.
  • The real world, to some, is getting reality to coincide with fantasy.
  • Numbing is not being cool or in control. It doesn’t even fool the world, does it?
  • Worrying is a form of numbing.
  • Abandonment is conflict without the other person.
  • When idea and reality do not coincide, anger arises.
  • We become what we meditate on. Meditate on God.
  • If in what you do you can’t be who you are, it’s not worth doing.
  • If with someone you can’t be who you are, it’s not worth being with them.
  • Grace under pressure is pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
  • When people lose control of their minds, they seek to gain power over others.