You cannot be both unhappy, and fully present in the Now.
You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes.
Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment – allow it to be as it is – then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.
Important thing to realize is the world is not here to make me happy. When you don’t demand that the situation, or place, or person should make you happy, then actually the situation, place, or person is quite satisfying.
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.
We can’t escape from the world anymore; we can’t escape from the mind. We need to enter surrender while we are in the world. That seems to be the path that is effective in the world that we live in now.
Germany is a nation that created an enormous amount of suffering on the planet. The German people also themselves have suffered, because it always goes together.
If the only teacher you have is your suffering, you will need a substantial dose of it for the ego to dissolve. But if the power of spiritual teaching is already at work, then a minor event can dissolve the ego.
I sometimes say animals are closer to God than humans. They are closer to the source. The humans are more lost in the mind forms. Being is more obscured to the human because of the overlay of ego and mental formation.
There is no separation between being and the manifested world, between the manifested and the unmanifested. But the unmanifested is so much vaster, deeper, and greater than what happens in the manifested.
When forms begin to crumble there is always an opportunity for great deepening. By deepening I mean the arising of who you are beyond form.
You cannot have a desire to surrender because that’s non-surrender. Surrender arises spontaneously sometimes in people who don’t even have a word for it. And I know that openness is there in many people.
Every human being in the human form has limitations.
You can be effective in this world without stress.
Worry means the mind is controlling you. Worry is always pointless. A solution never comes out of worry.
Words that arise spontaneously out of the state of presence are charged with spiritual power: the power to awaken.
I call animals “guardians of Being,” especially animals that live with humans. Because, for many humans, it’s through their contact with animals they get in touch with that level of being.
Look at all the conflict between tribes, nations, and religions. They need their enemies, because they provide the sense of separateness on which their collective egoic identity depends.
Peace comes from being aligned with the present moment. Wherever you are, you feel that you are home – because you are home.
Sometimes people need to experience great loss to really be driven deeper.