There is an ancient idea, perhaps best expressed in the New Testament, which states that before a human being can hope to awaken, he or she must have not enemies. When you lie to someone, you have automatically made an enemy because you will always resist that person out of fear that he or she will expose your lie at any given moment. Therefore, not only have we made an enemy when we lie, we a...

When all you have is yourself, you have to be afraid. And yet if you really had possession of yourself, fear would not have any power over you. And if we're really honest with ourselves, we can see that presently we lose ourselves all of the time. We are always trying to hold in place who we think we are supposed to be. That is not freedom. Being yourself is not the same thing as straining to...

There is something in us that actually enjoys feeling stressed. We must discover that we live with an opposing self. We can catch moments of opposition by coming back to ourselves.

When untouched by the mind we can receive the whole of an impression and thereby be changed by it. Most of the time what we do is involve the mind in the impression by naming and describing it, and because of this we do not receive the whole impression, and therefore we are not changed.

The rewards that we give ourselves are not real rewards. They're passing pleasures, momentary possessions, and fleeting feelings born out of an attempt to reduce or release oneself from a certain amount of tension. Because of this, the very act of rewarding ourselves is always incomplete and actually ties us to a certain unseen pattern of avoiding situations when they get "too hard." When you...