Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.

Since ancient times the term awakening has been used as a kind of metaphor that points to the transformation of human consciousness. There are parables in the New Testament that speak of the importance of being awake, of not falling back to sleep.

An emotion is your body's reaction to your mind.

Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.

Action arising out of suffering is contaminated with suffering and causes further suffering, and that is karma. Action that arises out of a state of "acceptance" is totally free of karma. And there is a vast difference.

God is not a personality outside of you. What God is, is inextricably part of what you are. God is the dimension of depth within you.

You can be effective in this world without stress.

I am optimistic that humanity is going to make it, that humanity is going to reach, finally, a new state of consciousness which will then create a different kind of world.

The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.

Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

You may remember the paradox of time we mentioned earlier: Whatever you do takes time, and yet it is always now. So while your inner purpose is to negate time, your outer purpose necessarily involves future and so could not exist without time. But it is always secondary. Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.

Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure consciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form.

Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.

Things are both getting better and getting worse. The madness is accelerating but an acceleration of the new consciousness is also coming in. However, this latter development is less apparent when you listen to the media. The media still mostly reflects what is happening in the sphere of the old consciousness.

Work to recognize the primary importance of the present moment. A good little pointer toward that is to ask yourself, "What is my relationship with the present moment? How am I relating to it?"

Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.

To the ego, loving and wanting are the same, whereas true love has no wanting in it, no desire to possess or for your partner to change.

You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation.

The place that I love most is the stillness. It's not that the stillness is lost when I talk or when I teach because the words arise out of the stillness. But when people leave me, there is only the stillness left. And I love that so much.

The world can only change from within.

The ego's form of happiness can't exist without unhappiness. The ego will be happy when something good happens but unhappy when it ends.

Since ancient times, spiritual masters of all traditions have pointed to the Now as the key to the spiritual dimension. Despite this, it seems to have remained a secret.