Each time you get ready to throw your hands up in the air, do your best to remember the following. For as strange as this may seem to you as you stand there, feeling oh-so uncertain, here's the true perspective to be embraced: These are the good times, not the bad ones! In fact, it can be said that the onset of these trying moments is what you've been working toward for all along.

How can this be possible? Your confusion indicates that you've reached a real inner threshold; you stand before the possibility of leaving behind who you have been and what you have understood up until now, which is the same as entering into something genuinely new to you. And this "unthinkable" place is the same as the doorway to a whole new life. So take heart!

Second, if you'll simply persist with your journey, you'll pass right through these times of trial. I guarantee it. Nothing can stop your sincere inquiry, including those thoughts and feelings telling you that you can't go any further because you don't understand how to take the next step. Take that step anyway. Then you'll understand.

The Light from one small moment of honest self-inquiry is more powerful than the accumulated darkness of a million years of doubt. So dare to proceed. . . and succeed!

It's true. Our energy is wrongly spent battling windmills. When we awaken, even a little bit, and begin walking out of the crowd of thoughts -- letting them go instead of trying to control them -- all of that wonderful energy essential to our true sense of self returns to rule the roost. It radiates the natural health and strong sense of well-being that only it is capable of providing in us. And now, a question for you. Your response will answer what you've asked me. What person, finding a buried chest of gold, takes only a few coins home with him when, with just a bit of extra work, he can possess the whole hidden treasure? Right! I know you'll keep working.

Pay no attention to what your own thoughts and feelings are trying to tell you the whole time you're sitting. Learn to watch and drop these dark inner voices. They don't want you to succeed and there's a good reason why. They can't dwell in that silent world you wish to enter and that wishes to enter you.

So persist! You will prevail. For even as you struggle to stay aware of yourself in the present moment, that moment itself changes. And as it does, so do you.

Slowly, subtly at first, but eventually even beyond your mind's protests, the distinction between your sense of self and your awareness of the present moment melts away. And as it does, a new, deeper sense of silence floods into you; filling your awareness with itself and, at the same time, with yet another awareness that the source of this supreme stillness is arising out of your own being. It washes everything out of its way. And so arrives a quiet mind.