Mentors: How to Help and Be Helped

By being open to suggestion, by letting go of my will in favour of the will of others, I begin to change. You can't think your way into acting differently, but you can act your way into thinking differently.

This spiritual life, in the end it is not a choice, it’s what’s left when you run out of choices.

Generally educational bodies do not exist to bring out your innate brilliance but to monger your wayward nature into a unit of manageable energy that will not be too disruptive to the social systems that benefit the powerful.

I come from there, there where I never belonged.

Addicts are not enslaved by drugs, drugs serve as an escape from the false ideals of a materialistic society.

That you can never base a relationship on the hope that the other person will some day change. You are in a relationship with the person as they are today. If they want to change themselves then that's encouraging but you will never change them.

Because I have a program of recovery I recognize that I must when in crisis: 1. Acknowledge it. 2. Believe it could improve. 3. Ask for help.

I have been raised an individualist; the recipe: doting mother, absent father, no siblings, highly alert, low self-esteem – an off-the-shelf cake mix for narcissists, dictators, kooks and crooks.

You can’t think your way into acting differently, but you can act your way into thinking differently.

Intention and attention, they say. Where your attention goes, so shall you become. As you intend to be, so shall you be.

you said that I should not look at the people of the world as resources there to serve me but at myself as someone who can help others. To accept that everything won’t go my way all the time and when I am disappointed to talk through those feelings before acting on them.

The world of politics is so corrupt that it automatically weeds out the well-intentioned, and anyone sincere will be subjected to pestilent mud-slinging

Perhaps if we spend time around positive people, being positive to one another, we can raise our common frequency as well as our individual wellbeing.

How do you not succumb to base emotions?’ I asked him. He said: ‘When I feel jealous or prideful it reminds me that I need to move closer to God.

I am not dealing with the total of this man. Is one ever dealing with a total person?

If a conservative is a mugged liberal, a dad is a knackered Jesus.

I must’ve told her of my plan to cope with the pain of divorce by having sex with lots of people because she said, ‘What does it mean then, all this meditation, this program, this faith in God, if as soon as there is a problem in your life you turn to sex?’ Well, what it means is that the meditation, program and faith in God are all phoney, hollow practices, phatic chants and empty dances that I carry out when the going is good, basically just for their aesthetic value. But when pain comes, and pain is always coming, I will abruptly turn, like a good little soldier, to a materialistic solution to a spiritual problem. It means that my true religion is materialism, my true god is the ego, and what I really mean when I say ‘I want to be enlightened’ is ‘I want to feel nice’.