The person who betrayed you is sunning themselves on a beach in Hawaii and you're knotted up in hatred. Who is suffering?

It is the basic principle of spiritual life that we learn the deepest things in unknown territory. Often it is when we feel most confused inwardly and are in the midst of our greatest difficulties that something new will open. We awaken most easily to the mystery of life through our weakest side. The areas of our greatest strength, where we are the most competent and clearest, tend to keep us away from the mystery.

Even time is a concept. In reality we are always in the eternal present. The past is just a memory, the future just an image or thought. All our stories about past and future are only ideas, arising in the moment. Our modern culture is so tyrannized by goals, plans, and improvement schemes that we constantly live for the future. But as Aldous Huxley reminded us in his writings, "An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity...the idea of endless progress is the devil's work, even today demanding human sacrifice on an enormous scale.

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Use whatever has come to awaken patience, understanding, and love.

Where we tended to be judgmental, we became more judgmental of ourselves in our spiritual practice.