Q: Is self-realization so important? A: Without it you will be consumed by desires and fears, repeating themselves meaninglessly in endless suffering. Most people do not know that there can be an end to pain. But once they have heard the good news, obviously going beyond all strife and struggle is the most urgent taskContinue reading

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.  Confucius   Every major religion says that God is omnipresent. Every place, every time. Every molecule, every moment. From before the universe began, through every day of these billions and billions of years, and back again to the dissolution that must come at the end of things.Continue reading

The Lightest Touch Good poetry begins with the lightest touch, a breeze arriving from nowhere, a whispered healing arrival, a word in your ear, a settling into things, then like a hand in the dark it arrests the whole body, steeling you for revelation. In the silence that follows a great line you can feelContinue reading

Everything is Waiting for You Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grandContinue reading

Life is difficult.   This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult–once we truly understand and accept it–then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the factContinue reading

Because the basic mechanism of fear is of animal origin and a prerequisite to survival, it is built into the very structure and physiology of the human brain.   The capacity to analyze and abstract the perception of time and its concept of the future provides an endless variety of real or imaginary conditions alongContinue reading

Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, orContinue reading

In the mixture of starlight and cloud-reflected sunlight in which the desert world is now illuminated, each single object stands forth in preternatural though transient brilliance, a final assertion of existence before the coming of night: each rock and shrub and tree, each flower, each stem of grass, diverse and separate, vividly isolate, yet joinedContinue reading

So we all serve all of life through all of our spiritual endeavors–everything that we surrender to God for the good of all, every advance, every forgiveness that we personally do, every time we let go of feeling sad and unhappy, every negativity we let go–benefits all of mankind. Consequently, anyone who is in spiritualContinue reading