It is possible to modify your awareness to perceive what plants perceive, birds, beings in the astral, the causal.

Over the years of much self-hate, I came to realize that whether sexuality was in my life or not, it didn't seem to matter. I just surrendered the whole thing to God.

The second stage of meditation begins when you can successfully stop thought for long periods of time. At this point you move beyond the awareness of this world.

Stopping thought also involves shifting your values. Thought is stimulated by ideas that we have about life and the world.

All I can say is that these cult stories are totally untrue, are without any foundation, and trade on a deep bias against Westerners who dare to embrace an Eastern belief-system.

If a person sets out to practice meditation in this lifetime and they have a little bit of spiritual evolution behind them and they're quite dedicated, it really is not at all an impossible task to enter into salvakalpa samadhi in this particular lifetime.

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.