Attention

Since what others may do to us is not in our power to change, we need only concern ourselves with what we do to ourselves, for this is in our power.

The first step to breaking out of any rut in life is to no longer enable the parts of us that keep walking in them while wishing they weren't so deep! Learning to watch our own thoughts and feelings -- to be quietly attentive to what the mind is attending to in each moment -- ensures that we won't fall into these ditches, because our heightened level of attention keeps them from being dug! We...

Who in his or her right mind believes -- even for a moment -- that the path to lasting contentment would be paved by continually thinking about everything that is seen as missing from one's life? Such a path may promise pleasure to come but its steps are spiked with discontentment. Let's look at what we must do to free ourselves from our discontentment and that ever-seeking, never-quite-satis...

When attention is directed, it has the ability to invest an idea with energy and life. Wherever you place your attention, you give life to that seed of thought. We've all experienced how the power of attention almost seems to have a magnetic pull. This power can be used for good or bad. When we use it for practical work, or for honest self-observation, we use it to our own benefit. However, w...

Looking for the power to be happy is not found in a person, place, possession, idea, or belief, but through the new understanding that your higher, permanent nature needs no power outside of itself in order to be in charge of an inner or outer attacker.

It is unnatural for any human being to be dominated by anything. Your only true responsibility is to understand this higher fact. And your corrected understanding places you in the right relationship with all gloomy thoughts and defeated feelings; which is that you simply have nothing to do with them. We are not saying to act or pretend as though dark feelings don't exist. This is very importa...

One sure measure of spiritual growth is found in our developing awareness that each and every present moment of our lives is a special kind of spiritual looking glass.

Our attention connects us to life; it establishes our relationships with all that unfolds around and within us.

If we see how much of our unhappiness is self-created, through being inattentive to our own interior life, then accordingly, we can learn to re-direct our attention, placing it where we will within what is right and bright. But, there is only one way to realize this reversal: we must work to see how wrongly directed attention works against us. Perhaps a thought pops into your mind about a pr...

The more I think I know about true spirituality, the more I become easily aggravated by the behavior of others, especially when I hear someone make an obviously false (spiritually) statement, or I observe inconsistent behavior. I sense that part of my anger is seeing the inconsistency and false behavior in myself. What is the right way for me to handle these moments?...

We frequently feel ourselves to be under the power of things. We feel we are the victims of an unfair social system, economic upheavals, painful relationships -- even a lawn chair that won't unfold right. We fight these conditions, feeling ourselves to be under their "dark" influence. The fact is, however, these events do not exist as negative events except for our perception of them. The only...

If one day you bang your elbow and seven years later the same spot still aches, and now radiating pains are appearing in your fingers and shoulder, you would start to suspect that something in your body's system was amiss! You would conclude, virtually beyond any doubt, that your original injury never healed properly. By the very fact of its continuing presence in our body, we intuitively kno...