Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, 'Be still, and know that I am God.' But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don't need to carry it around with you after you've crossed the river.

Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital energy.

What is God? The eternal one life underneath all the forms of life. What is love? To feel the presence of the one life deep within yourself and all creatures; to be it! Therefore, all love is the love of God.

If spacious stillness is missing, the relationship will be dominated by the mind and can easily be taken over by problems and conflict. If stillness is there, it can contain anything.

You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.

A built-in reminder is the simple understanding that whenever any kind of unhappiness arises, you know you've lost the now. That's a built-in alarm clock. The moment you realize you've lost the now, come back to the now.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.