These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness.

Any attempt to display the universe of impermanence arouses rejection patterns, fear, anger, and despair.

Any power must always meet a greater power.

They were eye-minded creatures and soon it would be night, the time of the ear-minded.

Fears destroys values.

You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

After all, wealth doesn’t necessarily have to be spent on any particular thing. It’s just . . . potentially useful.

He stood atop a dune and scanned all around: emptiness, emptiness, emptiness.

To exist is to stand out, away from the background.

In the desert, especially at night, you encounter the dangers of hard thinking.

Something flickered at the edges of conscious perception.

Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to crises.

There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

You will become whatever it is you most deeply desire.

The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.

How easy it is to follow our thoughts instead of our senses.