Think about all the finish lines you've managed to cross in your lifetime where you thought you were an uncontested winner. Let's name a few: "They said I was great!" "She said she loved me!" "I made the deal!" "At last I own what I've always wanted!" "The crisis is over at last." "I beat the odds!" "Now I know I'm a good and wise person." Then comes that untimely, unkind, or unexpected...

All relationships suffer when stagnation sets in; whether in a pond or our personal dealings with others, everything must be continually refreshed in order to realize its true potential. For us this means each re-appearance of some old resentment, fear, or regret, chokes the life out of our chance to love one another, which is our spiritual responsibility. What's so hard for us to understand i...

The way the mind works now, it looks out and there's just this world with you that messes with it, and me that wants it right. It's all one world to me. But awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn't the only world.

To hold a wish to punish someone begins with the unconscious embrace of the very pain we wish to inflict.

Meekly submitting to any negative emotion in the hopes it will run its course and leave us alone just invites it to subjugate us again.

One of the most shocking and necessary discoveries along the path is that what we love does not love us. We are filled all the time with powerful feelings and emotions that seem to lift or otherwise provide purpose and self-worth. It is not too much to say that most of these inner states are lies -- hopelessly incomplete of themselves, and seeking completion in some secret opposite that they g...

To enter the true Now, where a timeless intelligence awaits, awake within itself, requires first that we align ourselves with the eternal principles that are its secret foundation. Let's look into one of the most fundamental of these empowering principles taught by every great teacher: We reap what we sow. In these so-called progressive times, this all but forgotten principle is as simple a...

There is a Love that transcends every experience that a human being can have of the sensation or the emotion that we call "love." It isn't the love we have for our family. It isn't the love we have for nature. It isn't even the love that we feel when we're thinking about a truth and we feel uplifted by it. It is a Love of a completely different order.

One day an announcement was posted. It said there would be an open series of marathons and foot races comprised of various distances and degrees of difficulty. All who wished to test themselves against course, clock, and each other, were invited to compete for fabulous gifts and prizes, as well as for national recognition for being the best in their class.

If you've ever been in a condition where you've found yourself in a rut -- maybe you can't stop thinking about something, maybe there's a problem that you wish you could just get past but the conditions of your life won't allow you to do it, or maybe you want to make a real change but you look at your life and say, "It's impossible, the situation I'm in" -- in such moments, apart from natural responsibility (should you have that) to those who are dependent...

Long before it's possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves. Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn't the only world. Because the way the mind works now, it looks out and there's just this world with you that messes with it and me that wants it right. It's all one world to me.

Most of us, if we have one shred of decency, have tried to do stuff about the stuff that we don't want to know about in ourselves, and certainly that we don't want others to know -- "the dirty little secret" -- how there's a certain party or character that given the right conditions, will appear and absolutely not only corrupt you but anyone and anything that it touches. How about this?...