Be present as the watcher of your mind – of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react.
The peace that comes with surrendered action turns to a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing.
A great silent space holds all of nature in its embrace. It also holds you.
The state of presence is the only state in which creative energy is available to you.
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of consciousness. We need to go on to the next stage now as a matter of urgency; otherwise, we will be destroyed by the mind, which has grown into a monster.
Surrender comes when you no longer ask, ‘Why is this happening to me?’
All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present.
To make money, to gather knowledge, to learn a new skill, to explore new territory, even to get from A to B – for all these things you need time. For almost everything you need time, except for one thing: to embrace the present moment.
We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie making.
Whatever you accept completely will take you to peace, including the acceptance that you cannot accept, that you are in resistance.
What is the relationship between awareness and thinking? Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.
Evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species.
Suffering begins when you mentally label a situation as bad. That causes an emotional contraction. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is available to you. The contraction cuts you off from that power, the power of life itself.
Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it.
A culture that denies death inevitably becomes shallow and superficial, concerned only with the external form of things. When death is denied, life loses its depth.
For a relationship to deepen, at some point the spiritual dimension needs to come in. You don’t even need to be fully awakened for this to happen, but if it does happen it certainly means you are awakening.
Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger.
Your unhappiness ultimately arises not from the circumstances of your life but from the conditioning of your mind.
The realm of consciousness is much vaster than thought can grasp. When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are.
Above all, the only thing you have to heal is the present thought. Get that right and the whole picture will change into one of harmony and joy.