The world we live in pictures a pie with only so many pieces, and if other people have more you have less, and you have to compete with other people in order to try to get ahead. You have to sell yourself at every available opportunity. The shift, the enlightened shift, has to do with a movement from competition to collaboration, from sales to service, from ambition to inspiration, and to a belief in scarcity to a belief in abundance as an eternal spiritual quality.

If I say to my daughter, "Go say `hi' to Aunt Gertrude," there is a reason there. I'm teaching her manners. I think the idea that she'll say `hi' to Aunt Gertrude only if she wants to is the biggest crock of silliness I've ever heard. Yet I meet people everyday who were clearly brought up to think that if they didn't want to say "hi" to Aunt Gertrude, that was fine.

If you allow spirit to have dominion in your heart you will have dominion in your life. That changes thinking. That IS the miracle. That I'm not just a child of the body, I'm a child of the universe and in the universe I am programmed for greatness, and the fact that I don't have money in my bank account now doesn't mean I'm any less programmed for greatness. I was programmed for greatness just like the acorn is programmed to be an oak tree.

Darkness is merely the absence of light, and fear is merely the absence of love. If we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.

Relationships never end, because they're of the mind; only bodies can separate. When you're missing someone, know it just means that on a soul level they've come to visit.

The spiritual journey has to do with learning to think more deeply and take as long a time as we need. That's the path to wisdom.

Love can be a huge mountain, a gentle garden, a raging storm, a cool breeze, or a perfect bath. But there is always fire somewhere nearby. There is always the red-hot stuff of the soul's initiation. If there isn't fire, then it isn't love ... If it doesn't insist that you move to your next level, if it doesn't take your heart and make it explode in a million pieces, only to fall back together again in some Moment of enlightened understanding, then you haven't really loved.