I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.

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.

Things and conditions can give you pleasure but they cannot give you joy- joy arises from within.

Before I wrote The Power of Now, I had a vision that I had already written the book and that it was affecting the world. I had a sense there was already a book somehow in existence. I drew a circle on a piece of paper and it said "book." Then I wrote something about the effect the book had on the world, how it influenced my life and other people's lives, and how it came to be translated into many languages affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

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.

Different ages have certain approaches, which may be more effective for one age and no longer effective in another age. The world that we live in now has much greater density to it; it is much more all-pervasive. And when I say "world," I include the human mind in it. The human mind has grown even since the time of the Buddha, 2,500 years ago. The human mind is more noisy and more all-pervasive, and the egos are bigger.

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.