Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.

The planet will not survive another hundred years of the same state of consciousness that produced the external effects of recent history.

So the single most vital step on your journey towards enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind.

You are not 'in the now;' you are the now. That is your essential identity-the only thing that never changes. Life is always now. Now is consciousness. And consciousness is who you are. That's the equation.

"Getting away from it all," many people want that, and of course ultimately the only way to get away from it all is to go within, now.

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.

Before I wrote The Power of Now, I had a vision that I had already written the book and that it was affecting the world. I had a sense there was already a book somehow in existence. I drew a circle on a piece of paper and it said "book." Then I wrote something about the effect the book had on the world, how it influenced my life and other people's lives, and how it came to be translated into many languages affecting hundreds of thousands of people.