The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.

Be alert as you watch a dog at play or at rest. Let the animal teach you to feel at home in the now, to celebrate life by being completely present. You just watch the tail ... with some dogs you just look at them - just a little look is enough - and their tail goes ...'Life is good! Life is good!' And they are not telling themselves a story of why life is good. It's a direct realization.

Look around the room a few times a day as if you had just been born into that room.

Sometimes people need to experience acute suffering before the thinking and the awareness of the consciousness separate. People then realize there is another dimension in them that is not thinking but the ability to be aware of thinking. It is not emotion but the ability to be aware of emotion.

Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

When you awaken spiritually, in fact, you can use thought much more effectively than before, but you realize there is a depth to your Being, a vibrantly alive stillness that is much vaster than thought. It is consciousness itself, of which the thinking mind is only a tiny aspect.

How’ is always more important that ‘what.’ See if you can give much more attention to the doing than to the result that you want to achieve through it.