Don't judge your meditations. Don't rate them. The physical mind cannot tell how well you did. As long as you are sitting there trying, something will happen.

Occasionally, in each age and in different lands, a Buddha is born, that is to say, an enlightened person...they re-codify the ways, the practices, they make changes that are just intelligent changes that adapt to a new century, a new culture.

Initially the student, in some traditions, is given a mantra, a particular word of power to focus on. While thoughts are cascading through your mind during meditation, you should be absorbed in the repetition of a mantra.

Free will exists and operates outside causality. It is not hooked to karma. Free will is like a well that is on your property. You can choose to draw water from the well or not.

If you are doing that which is within you, what that part of you that is beyond body would like you to do, then you would not experience stress because you would be very fulfilled.

You see, Buddhists are optimists. We never saw sunsets in Atlantis like we do now. We didn't have those great chemicals in the air.

With the practice of meditation you can move into other states of mind, sort of ungluing the glue that binds you to a particular perceptual mode, a way of seeing life which is an illusory one.