To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

You get there by realizing you are already there.

Loss is very painful, because any kind of loss leaves a hole in the fabric of one's existence.

What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.

And so I came to understand why some masters sometimes say, "You are already enlightened."

The essence of every form is the deathless. Even the essence of a blade of grass is the deathless. And that's why the world of form is sacred.

Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless.