The secret self knows the anguish of our attachments and assures us that letting go of what we think we must have to be happy is the same as letting go of our unhappiness.
Know that everything is in perfect order whether you understand it or not.
The strength of any weakness within us is the degree to which it is feared.
It only seems that there is something more important for you to do than to just quietly be yourself.
All things good come to those for whom the Good is all things.
It isn't something of which most of us are aware, but we human beings are 'marked' with a certain strange feature, and that is: We want to change.
In these times - where social appearance is more important than spiritual substance - what has become our longing to change is really the unconscious desire to control not just the shape of our bodies (according to prevailing values) but to dominate our environment as well, regardless of the cost.
The path to the inwardly enriched life is not hidden from the man or woman who longs to walk upon it.
It's important for us to become aware of the fact that we are needful, for with that awareness also comes the sensing that we couldn't be needful if there weren't something to fulfill the need.
The mistake we have made in our lives is that over and over again we've run into the needful moment and then failed to learn its higher lesson. We don't like needful moments and therefore we resist them.
Don't believe what the spiritual sharks and clever carnival hustlers tell you about fearless living - they lie.
The deepest parts of you know that if freedom from fear was as easy as 'creating a new reality' for yourself, then you would already be the fearless person you know in your heart that you're meant to be.
When it comes to the fearless life, the divine gives nothing freely... save to those who freely give themselves to discovering the truth about their own fearless selves.
We go through our lives in a continual dance of being filled with something that needs an answer, and then going out and finding that answer... only to find out that our answer wasn't quite the answer.
If we're interested in spiritual things, we gradually realize that what we really need is to understand this nature that seems to be a bottomless basket, because there is no peace in it.
Being fully present is the best guarantee for a bright future.
Every relationship that we have in our lives - our contact with each person, place, and event - serves a very special, if yet to be realized purpose: They are mirrors that can serve to show us things about ourselves that can be realized in no other way.
Once something has outlived its usefulness in one area of life, its purpose for being in existence is no longer the same. The leaf that captures a stream of sunlight, and then transfers its energy to the tree, serves one purpose in the spring and summer, and another completely different one through the fall and winter.
Nothing in the universe can stop you from letting go and starting over.
Resistance to revelation, resistance to becoming conscious of all that dwells within us - high and low, light and dark - is the anti-change factor. It is also the mainspring of all our psychological fears.
Within the human being there exists both the needful and the needed. You know that the needful exists in you. Your own dissatisfaction tells you so. But you believe the needed is somewhere outside of you.
Eventually, we reach the point where we start to realize that we are not going to find peace, contentment, happiness, strength, fearlessness - all of the things that in our heart of hearts we wish we had - outside of us.
The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.
We need to see, and agree that what we seek already lives within us, and we within it. Now we know our one great task: watch for whatever promises us freedom, and then quietly, consciously refuse to see ourselves through the eyes of what we know is incomplete. Then we live wholeness itself, instead of spending our lives looking for it.
All we will ever know and share about love, humility, compassion, and sacrifice - the secrets that will reveal and then resolve old sorrows - awaits us within ourselves.
Real change isn't found in some new way to think about yourself, but in freedom from the need to think about yourself at all.
Be still; quietly remember the presence of and within yourself, and you will know, without thinking, that while all around you everything changes, within you lives something unchanging.
Statistics vary, but in less than seven years there won't be a single cell left in any of our bodies that's the same as it is today. This means that any human being who 'wants' to change is like a mountain river wanting to reach the valley floor. It's a done deal; that's what mountain rivers do, and 'changing' should be our first nature.
As those who have learned to rule their own mind will attest, misfortune is a state of mind long before it becomes a miserable circumstance.
You must learn to stop thinking in terms of beginnings and endings, successes and failures, and begin to treat everything in your life as a learning experience instead of a proving one.
