When you recognize the sacredness, the beauty, the incredible stillness and dignity in which a flower or a tree exists, you add something to the flower or the tree. Through your recognition, your awareness, nature too comes to know itself. It comes to know its own beauty and sacredness through you.

If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

For some people, it's the beginning of an awakening when they hear or read, "You have a voice in your head that never stops talking. Have you noticed that?" And suddenly they become aware that the thoughts go through their heads, whereas before they were so identified with them that they were those thoughts.

Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.

Look around the room a few times a day as if you had just been born into that room.

You create a good future by creating a good present. How do you do that? By recognizing the goodness that is already inherent in the present moment, even in the midst of challenges. Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.