If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.

From the age of three on, as far back as I remember, I just knew there was a God behind everything.

Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.

As Benjamin Franklin said, 'Those things that hurt, instruct.' It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.

Although I was raised in a profoundly secular home, I had a belief, an awareness of God, from as far back as I can remember.

The symptoms and the illness are not the same thing. The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than being the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more a phenomenon of grace — a gift of God, a message from the unconscious.

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.