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.

Strictly speaking, "you" cannot become enlightened, because who you take yourself to be is like a ripple in the ocean of consciousness - or a little wave if you're a VIP - and the ripple doesn't become enlightened until it realizes that its ripple-identity is ultimately a misperception, that it is the ocean taking on a fleeting ripple-form.

I drink a glass of wine or two occasionally with dinner. 'You drink alcohol?!' Well, if my state of consciousness is so fragile that a glass of wine would upset it, then it can't be worth very much.

What a liberation to realize that the 'voice in my head' is not who I am. 'Who am I, then?' The one who sees that.

Suppression of the feminine principal has enabled The Ego to gain absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche

In certain extreme cases, medication may be necessary. But it is given far too often, too easily, and too readily. Millions of children already are on tranquilizers, for example, and that is absurd.

Silence is Golden; it has divine power and immense energy. Try to pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, and every word. The unmanifested is present in this world as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.