I have spoken to many people who have begun to live in presence, and they find many changes come into their lives. Sometimes these changes happen as inner realizations - "This is what I have to do" - or they arise from the external when something suddenly happens.

The ego is a false sense based on mental concepts. It is identification with the body and the mind-primarily identification with thought form.

What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.

What you encounter at your destination once you get there depends on the quality of this one step. Another way of putting it: What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.

The only thing you ever have is now.

Through death you find yourself, because you no longer identify with form. You realize you are not the form with which you had identified ­ neither the physical nor the psychological form of "me". That form goes. It dissolves and who you are beyond form emerges through the opening where that form was. One could almost say that every form of life obscures God.

But there's a shift happening in humanity, a shift in consciousness, happening now because it has to happen now.