Whatever you want to achieve is secondary: the business, the exchange of information, whatever it may be. Yes, you do that also, but there is a deeper foundation - meeting that human being in a state of shared presence.

If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.

The ego's form of happiness can't exist without unhappiness. The ego will be happy when something good happens but unhappy when it ends.

If you are in a state of intense presence you are free of thought, yet highly alert. If your conscious attention sinks below a certain level, thought rushes in, the mental noise returns, stillness is lost, you're back in time.

"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.

When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change. The Roman philosopher Tacitus rightly observed that 'the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.' If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into aliveness, alertness and creativity.

You are this universe experiencing itself, very briefly, as a human.