The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

Where ever you are, be there totally.

At the deepest level, an 'open heart' is spacious presence, in which the sense of separateness between yourself and the 'other' dissolves and there is the recognition of oneness, of shared consciousness. That recognition is love. Sensing the formless essence in another and recognizing it as one with your own essence - that's what love is. All this is an intrinsic part of the awakened consciousness and the revelation of the spiritual dimension of life.

I sometimes say animals are closer to God than humans. They are closer to the source. The humans are more lost in the mind forms. Being is more obscured to the human because of the overlay of ego and mental formation.

If we don't change, if the egoic consciousness continues, I don't believe that humanity as a species can survive, or at least human civilization can survive, for another hundred years.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.