The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind.

A short attention span makes all of your perceptions and relationships shallow and unsatisfying.

Many adults play roles when they speak to young children. They use silly words and sounds. They talk down to the child. They don't treat the child as an equal. The fact that you temporarily know more, or you're bigger does not mean the child is not your equal.

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.

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.

The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.

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.