As difficult and shocking as it may be to consider, within us dwells a certain level of unconscious desire that loves... to not want. It has but one purpose: This part of us "lives" to resist anything that doesn't live up to its expectations. Why would anything want to live like that? Because what this dark nature likes most of all is being negative!

I am always surprised by your strength -- by how happy I am to be too weak to do anything except completely accept you. What is this power of yours? How shall I understand it? 

Are you a Gathering Force? When you come, do you collect all the parts of me that have wandered off high and low looking for you... somehow drawing them all into one place wherein their deep peace is that they once again know that they need never look for anything...

When we talk about making changes in ourselves, it could be said that it's like climbing a mountain. Why is the mountain a metaphor for spiritual change? There's a certain kind of effort necessary for climbing, isn't there? Also, the mountain represents a higher view. Because as you ascend the mountain, not only does the atmosphere change in terms of becoming more rarified, but every step higher up the mountain produces...

The truth is that letting go is very simple and, above all, natural; as natural for you and I as it is for a tree to shed the heavy, sun-ripened fruit that clings to its branches. Why? Because both man and tree, in fact all living things, are created to drop what is no longer needed. For the tree, the falling fruit carries its matured seed to the ground. No unnatural force is necessary. In a similar fashion -- that is to say, under higher but equally exacting laws...

Our experience in life is what it is teaching us: that the whole business of reaching for what we do and the way we do it is incapable of producing the perfection that our heart is looking for. What is it about seeing a great performer, a great athlete, a great mind that makes them seem so special? Is it what they have been able to bring into their lives as a result of what they love? Or is it the love itself that the person has become an expression of?

There are three ways to get what one wants from life: industry, cunning, or love. Industry is good but at best conditional, for it is subject to the passage and ravages of time. The "crafty" inevitably trap themselves. Love, on the other hand, liberates those who seek its company, and it is timeless. When all is said and done, this order of love has the last word because it is its own reward: whatever we are willing to let it make of us, it fashions from itself.

There isn't one thing, in every moment of our life, that isn't a mirror. Not one. Only we've never been taught that there is an invisible, eternal, incorruptible intelligence that is literally both that which we see and ourselves seeing it.

Before we can learn how to step outside the pattern set into motion by some habitual negative reaction toward others, we need a better understanding of the underlying forces that create it. In other words, we must find a way to look at these same moments through a "new set of eyes."

One of the greatest gifts that a man or woman can be given in this world (and only if they ask properly) is to understand that everything that happens to them - no matter what -- is for their greater good. It makes no difference what it is -- call it the worst thing in the world -- and most of us have had the experience of recognizing there were times when if we could have thrown away that moment full of fear, anger, resentment, we would have thrown it away.

Freedom, real freedom, does exist. But it is not a condition of events, nor is it found within another person's approval of us. Neither is real freedom ever a mere effect of circumstances, otherwise it is not freedom but merely a temporary pleasure we have mistaken for being the same as being free...

We're always trying, one way or the other, to grab and maintain something that will make us feel safe and whole forever. The pursuit of that wholeness, of that security, is through what we commonly call "powers." When we think of our security, we think of the powers that we must have to maintain it -- whether it's trying to please other people, trying to have, keep, and gain more possessions, or struggling to get some kind of control over a relationship or...

Every one of us who has ever been thrust into some seemingly overpowering circumstance is more than equally empowered to understand the following: What we receive in those life moments amounts to our individual life experience... and what we experience as our individual life has to do with that level of life's possibilities that we embrace and ultimately express...