Physical reality is one of the biggest horror movies of all, and you know how we love horror movies.

The motive for purifying yourself - that you feel spiritually impure - will prevent any genuine gain until you learn to love the impurity you started with. Can any being seriously think that he is going to pass through the infinity of time without ever making another mistake? Quite often a flash of enlightenment will give you this message: Go back to where you started and learn to love it more.

As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won't even have to try. It's a beautiful paradox: the more you open your consciousness, the fewer unpleasant events intrude themselves into your awareness.

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits.

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We could also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all, and that the entire universe is alive.

Loving yourself is a willingness to be in the same space with your own creations. How contracted would you become if you try to withdraw from your own ideas? Loving yourself is not a matter of building your ego. Egotism is proving you are worthwhile after you have sunk into hating yourself. Loving yourself will dissolve your ego: you will feel no need to prove you are superior.

Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment. That is why we often fear to open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much.