If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.

If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness, and creativity.

After having been lost in the world, suddenly, through the pressure of suffering, the realization comes that the answers may not be found out there in worldly attainment and in the future. That's an important point for many people to reach. That sense of deep crisis-when the world as they have known it, and the sense of self that they have known that is identified with the world, become meaningless.

Future success is dependent upon and inseparable from the consciousness out of which the actions emanate

The ego is just waiting to identify with anything. Whether it's your misery or being a great meditator, it seeks some identification.

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching.

Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disappointments before you realize that truth