"In every religion we find people with different approaches. Some are attracted by pious work and they endeavor for heavenly enjoyment, karmis. We also find those who seek knowledge, jnanis or mystics, and ultimately bhaktas, those who devote themselves with love. These are the basic categories, or types of philosophies, in every religion. They help to understand religion in a more objective and less sectarian way. This understanding cuts through all the religious boundaries because these are universal elements." 

(from a lecture, place and date unknown)

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"A person is known by the company they keep. If we hang out with spiritually minded people we tend to also be spiritual but if we hang out with people who are materialistic, then, inevitably, we get drawn into that. 

If you look at different schools of spiritual practice, different schools of wisdom, there is a generic and ubiquitous realization that ordinary vanity, being very proud and arrogant, is not spiritual.  Almost everybody figures this out, at least theoretically, because some people are very proud of their own humility. There are all these traps. Perhaps one of the most common historical traps for a spiritual practitioner is that, when you have a group of people, or even an individual, practicing spirituality very sincerely, or efficiently, or at least impressively to other people, people are attracted and a community forms. Almost all spiritual schools recognize the value of satsanga, spiritual associations. 

If the community is really moving and grooving, then you get another community and it spreads.  Then you get a society and, before long, you actually get a religion or something like that. Then inevitably—when you get a lot of human beings together, and when they have to cooperate together—then you have to have some kind of structured organization, and organization means they have to have hierarchy—no matter how much you try to sanitize it, or use other terms. However you slice it, at the end of the day, some people are in charge and some people aren’t. 

Then you get the situation where you have a successful spiritual movement, or religious movement, but there is power to be wielded, precisely because it is successful. There are many followers, and many pious people in the world who, when they feel grateful to a spiritual religious leader, they want to give a gift—and often gifts are accepted.  Then you get a treasury building up and religious structures are built—temples, synagogues, churches, meditation centers and so on.  And basically, then you get all of the infrastructure, and the power, and the wealth of human society.

Then there’s also a sense that the most spiritually advanced person should be at the summit. Then there’s this tension, where someone—who is spiritually advanced, or is assumed to be, or hopes to be—is wielding power, controlling the people, spending money and so on. Then you get people coming up through the ranks of the spiritual organization, who are overtly ambitious, or often, covertly ambitious…and they learn the ropes. They realize that if you behave in certain ways, then you impress the other people in the community, and they gradually work their way up to positions of religious leadership—but behind it all is more ambition than actual enlightenment.

Even if you are an individual practitioner, you may become proud of your own loss of ego.  There is a sense of achievement. As we start to advance, we start to become proud of our advancement."

(Spring Tour Lecture, “Distinguishing Ego from the Self,” March 20^th 2008, USA,  Location unknown)