If you start picking up other people's impressions while you are meditating, then instead of clearing yourself, you are just going to completely glom yourself up to the point where there is no meditation.

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

The balance and patience factors are much more critical in surfing than they are in snowboarding ... if you're out surfing serious waves and you wipe out, you don't land on soft snow. It's usually either very sharp coral, or you get raked across the beach gravel and sand while you're tumbling underwater.

You might say living in a monastery cuts down the commutation time. That alone gives you a couple extra hours a day to meditate. In a monastery you lead a relatively simply life. You don't need a lot of possessions.

It takes a number of years to learn to hold the mind perfectly in one place. But each day we do it a little better, and in the doing we're releasing energy that is taking our mind in higher diffuse planes of attention.

In a few short years you might have to become a scuba diver and go hundreds of feet underwater - It will be the last refuge of pure aura and power on our planet, the oceans' depths.

The stars in the sky last for billions of years. That's nothing to the mind, nothing. It's an instant, a millisecond. The mind shines radiantly forever. But we don't see the shine because of the clutter.