Forgiveness of the present is even more important than forgiveness of the past. If you forgive every moment - allow it to be as it is - then there will be no accumulation of resentment that needs to be forgiven at some later time.

Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger

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.

You pick up the phone and you talk to somebody. There's a voice on the other end and you say what you have to say. This is how I perceive my life. I don't see myself as "Oh, I'm doing this great thing because I'm going to give this talk, now everybody's going to be transformed."

For many people, illness - loss of health - represents the crisis situation that triggers an awakening. With serious illness comes awareness of your own mortality, the greatest loss of all.

Stress is a form of suffering, but it is accepted as normal. And it is normal in our world.

When faced with a radical crisis, when the old way of being in the world, of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature doesn't work anymore, when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems, an individual life-form -- or a species -- will either die or become extinct or rise above the limitations of its condition through an evolutionary leap.