As your meditation practice improves from month to month, more and more light and ecstasy will spill over into the moments of your daily life. Eventually you will always exist in a state of continual light.

Everything that you have done has led up to what you are now. Everything you do now will lead up to what you will be.

Career success is using your daily work, schoolwork, work in the world, work at home, as a way of advancing your mental state.

You cannot be born and you cannot die. You will exist in a universe that goes on forever. That is the ultimate horror from the Zen point of view. You could be unhappy forever.

Take the level of dedication that anyone had to get to the top in any field, and apply it to self-discovery. Except that when you get to the top of anything else, it washes away. You will die. The only thing that stays with you forever is your awareness.

You must constantly strive to enlarge your awareness. Naturally, if you do, you will have an uncommonly fine and happy life.

Even the lucky ones, who do manage to become happy by attaining their goals, live each day in fear of losing whatever it is they may have gained.