Love does not want or fear anything.

Most human interactions are confined to the exchange of words — the realm of thought. It is essential to bring some stillness, particularly into your close relationships.

No relationship can thrive without the sense of spaciousness that comes with stillness. Meditate or spend silent time in nature together. When going for a walk or sitting in the car or at home, become comfortable with being in stillness together. Stillness cannot and need not be created. Just be receptive to the stillness that is already there, but is usually obscured by mental noise.

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict.

If stillness is there, it can contain anything.

When you look upon another human being and feel great love toward them, or when you contemplate beauty in nature and something within you responds deeply to it, close your eyes for a moment and feel the essence of that love or that beauty within you, inseparable from who you are,your true nature. The outer form is a temporary reflection of what you are within, in your essence.

That is why love and beauty can never leave you,

although all outer forms will.

Ultimately, of course, there is no other, and you are always meeting yourself.

Nature can bring you to stillness. That is its gift to you.

Only when you are still inside do you have access to the realm of stillness that rocks, plants, and animals inhabit.

Through you nature becomes aware of itself.

Nature has been waiting for you, as it were, for millions of years.

The air that you breathe is nature, as is the breathing process itself.

You didn't create your body, nor are you able to control the body's functions.
An intelligence greater than the human mind is at work.
It is the same intelligence that sustains all of nature.

You cannot get any closer to that intelligence than by being aware of your own inner energy field— by feeling the aliveness, the animating presence within the body.

Bring your attention to your breathing and realize that you are not doing it.
It is the breath of nature.

If you had to remember to breathe, youwould soon die, and if you tried to stop breathing,nature would prevail.

Most people's lives are run by desire and fear.

Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully.

All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less.

The habitual and reactive "no" strengthens the ego. "Yes" weakens it.
Your form identity, the ego, cannot survive surrender.

"Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen.

Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention.

This is surrendered action — empowered action.

Surrender becomes so much easier when you realize the fleeting nature of all experiences and that the world cannot give you anything of lasting value.

And the miracle is that when you are no longer placing an impossible demand on it, every situation, person, place, or event becomes not only satisfying but also more harmonious, more peaceful.

Pure consciousness is Life.

Just as water can be solid, liquid, or gaseous, consciousness can be seen to be "frozen" as physical matter,
"liquid" as mind and thought,
or formless as pure consciousness.

The One Life.

The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life.

You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.

When you don't know who you are, you create a mind-made self as a substitute for your beautiful divine being and cling to that fearful and needy self.

And that cannot know itself; it is itself.

I am Life.

I am not my thoughts, emotions, sense perceptions, and experiences.

I am not the content of my life.

I am Life.

I am the space in which all things happen.

I am consciousness.

I am the Now.

I Am.

The Now becomes obscured by time.

And so you forget your rootedness in Being, your divine reality, and lose yourself in the world.

Confusion, anger, depression, violence, and conflict arise when humans forget who they are.

When you step into the Now, you step out of the content of your mind.

Most people confuse the Now with what happens in the Now, but that's not what it is. The Now is deeper than what happens in it.

It is the space in which it happens.

You continuously overlook the most obvious fact:
your innermost sense of I Am has nothing to do with what happens in your life, nothing to do with content.

That sense of I Am is one with the Now.

Feel the aliveness within your body. That anchors you in the Now.

Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome?

Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?

A simple but radical spiritual practice is to accept whatever arises in the Now — within and without.

No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is.

The present moment is as it is. Always.

Can you let it be?
Leave Life alone. Let it be.

"Forgive them for they know not what they do,"

Jesus' words, also apply to yourself.

Do you know who i am ?!?

Complaining and reactivity are favorite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself.

For many people, a large part of their mentalemotional activity consists of complaining and reacting against this or that. By doing this, you make others or a situation "wrong" and yourself "right."

Through being "right," you feel superior, and through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self.

In reality, of course, you are only strengthening the illusion of ego.

The egoic sense of self needs conflict because its sense of a separate identity gets strengthened in fighting against this or that, and in demonstrating that this is "me" and that is not "me."

In your dealings with people, can you detect subtle feelings of either superiority or inferiority toward them?

You are looking at the ego, which lives through comparison.

"living for the next moment,"

When you live through the ego, you always reduce the present moment to a means to an end.

You live for the future, and when you achieve your goals, they don't satisfy you, at least not for long.

If you set egoic goals for the purpose of freeing yourself, enhancing yourself or your sense of importance, even if you achieve them, they will not satisfy you.

Set goals, but know that the arriving is not all that important.

When anything arises out of presence, it means this moment is not a means to an end: the doing is fulfilling in itself every moment. You are no longer reducing the Now to a means to an end, which is the egoic consciousness.

Rest In Peace

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention?

A dash — one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

I Am.

When you think or speak about yourself, when you say, "I," what you usually refer to is "me and my story."
This is the "I" of your likes and dislikes, fears and desires, the "I" that is never
satisfied for long.

It is a mind-made sense of who you are, conditioned by the past and seeking to
find its fulfillment in the future.

Can you see that this "I" is fleeting, a temporary formation, like a wave pattern on the surface of the water?

"All things are intrinsically one."

The Truth is far more all-encompassing than the mind could ever comprehend. No thought can encapsulate the Truth.
At best, it can point to it.

Mastery of life is the opposite of control.

Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling — mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place.

Feel the energy of your inner body.

Immediately mental noise slows down or ceases.
Feel it in your hands, your feet, your abdomen, your chest.
Feel the life that you are, the life that animates the body.

The body then becomes a doorway, so to speak,into a deeper sense of aliveness underneath the fluctuating emotions and underneath your thinking.

Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you.
Neither are you an angry,sad, or fearful person.
Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not "yours," not personal.

They are conditions of the human mind.

They come and go.

Here, Now.

Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is.

You don't wantto be where you are. Here, Now.

The human condition: lost in thought.

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw your attention in completely.

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

True intelligence operates silently.

Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.

Feeling the oneness of yourself with all things is true love.

When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself.

Allow nature to teach you stillness.

Stillness is your essential nature.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is
inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that
is deeper than name and form.

You are that awareness, disguised as a person.