When you meet another human being, you meet the physical self, then you meet the psychological self that's behind it, which is their mental conditioning, their patterns of behavior and so on. And then, there is a deeper level to every human being that transcends all of that. I can only sense that in another human being and relate to another human being on that deeper level if I have gone deep enough within myself.

You can't think about presence, and the mind can't understand it. Understanding presence is being present.

Many expressions that are in common usage, and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don't know who they are. You say: "He lost his life" or "my life," as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That?

That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.

Suffering needs time. It cannot survive in the now.

Whatever you want to achieve is secondary: the business, the exchange of information, whatever it may be. Yes, you do that also, but there is a deeper foundation - meeting that human being in a state of shared presence.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is - no matter what form it takes - you are still, you are at peace.