Light is to darkness what love is to fear; in the presence of one the other disappears.

Sometimes you are lifted up to the mountaintop as a gift from the universe, so you can see what is possible. Then you are put down back at the bottom: Now you have to earn it for yourself.

I have seen so much obstructed potential among people who lack personal discipline, who just slough it off, whatever it is, and who think that nothing matters very much. I want my daughter to have what I think of as a capacity for self-discipline. Not the sort of self-discipline that diminishes her own wild passions, but that makes it safer for her to own those wild passions.

It's tempting to think that decisions that are not life-and-death are therefore unimportant, and that the little compromises we make don't matter to our bottom line or our spiritual selves. How many of us are tempted, in business, to make a less-than-ethical decision? To appropriate someone else's idea or fudge some numbers? We have to remember that maintaining our ethical and spiritual selves is absolutely linked with achieving the degree of success we're working toward.

I have heard it said that living out of our vision is more powerful than living out of our circumstance. Holding on to a vision invokes the circumstances by which the vision is achieved. Vision is content; material circumstances mere form.

If we only identify with the mortal world, then we identify with a level of scarcity and lack and brokenness, and that will be our experience. But if we shift our experience of self-identification - and this is what enlightenment is - from the body-self to the spiritual-self, then we place ourselves under an entirely different set of possibilities and probabilities.

Unless we can be like children, we can't be happy.