It is your spiritual right to decide what kind of thoughts and feelings are permitted to roam through your consciousness.

Real spiritual strength is realized, slowly, by daring to detect and drop the blind negative states that we've been allowing to define us.

Many times the very thing we want from others is the very thing that we ourselves either lack at the moment or otherwise somehow are withholding from them.

Even if your best efforts - the work to be awake, and attentive to your inner life - feels as if it's failed to produce any real result... nevertheless, persist: one day a Light that is in exact proportion to your labor will flood the soul, filling it with New Life.

One maxim of self-development I sense is true is that the way out of any stressful situation is to "go through it." How does this approach apply to reducing stress-producing thought-attacks? How can I work to rid myself of these waking nightmares I have where I feel like life is going to crush me?...

Our lives, as they are, are less than half of what they are intended to be. We can recognize that something is clearly missing. Often, even though we come up with: "It's him," "It's her," "It's this," or "It's that" which is clearly missing, it turns out that we may even get these things, and things still seem to be missing in our lives...

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.

It wasn't that long ago that men and women understood that the purpose of prayer wasn't to bring things into their lives to make their lives better. It was so that through prayer, they could bring themselves into a completely different order of their own consciousness.

We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance...

I want you to remember for the rest of your life on this earth that you were never created to be the slave of any negative thought or feeling, that you were never created to be the subject of some limitation. The only way you'll ever know the truth of that statement is when, through what is ultimately a long process in this education of the soul, you begin at last to experience the dawning o...