We are all wonderful engineers. We engineer a world, a life, a society – a folly – designing, building, repairing, so that we never need face the flaws in our character that prevent us from becoming in any way fully conscious. This is our brilliance, and, ultimately, our downfall. And by the time we discover the folly it's all too late.

Softness is the space between the eyes which expands into a plane of compassion hovering over your world.

"frankly happiness is based on the heart considerably more than it is on external circumstance"

Look and you pull out of the picture. See and you fall into the picture. We look with the eyes but we see with the heart.

Shoulders fall from spine and drop to hips. This is the downward consequence of gravity. Earth drives up through heel, sacrum, heart, head, like a cool spear. This is the upward consequence of gravity. Surrender to each. Be aware of each. Feel how one generates the other.

Remove evolutionary forces, as we seem to have done to our species, and we don't just stay still, we devolve.

A good life is not one that maximises pleasure and minimises pain but one that consciously works through karma – one that isn't wasted.

"Never surrender to the momentum of mediocrity."

sometimes i can get really into a normal thing just by fucking with the way i perceive it

Out in the moshav with Tai yesterday, we passed a boy riding a hoverboard. "Is it difficult?" she asked him. "Only if you're frightened," he replied.

Gilda, the neighbour's dog, a pitbull cross, was always chained up – had once nipped a stranger. Always needy, she gave me such greetings: pure excitement and affection. Now, reprieved, she is free to roam and eat at will, so has become fat and depressed, unable to muster enthusiasm for anything. But she's happy, and of course that's all that matters.

before everyone got blinded by options and retreated into fitting in

break the habit of automatic pilot

The freedom that lies beyond culture.

"Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, à la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears."

"Not what I have, but what I do, is my kingdom."