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.

I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you don't even have to make a move. There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened. All potential experiences are within you already. You can open up to them at any time.

Go beyond reason to love: it is safe. It is the only safety.

What you deny to others will be denied to you, for the plain reason that you are always legislating for yourself; all your words and actions define the world you want to live in.

It is quite natural, in pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as you become more loving, but not in ways you can exactly predict. What happens is not important as how you react to what happens.

Perhaps many of us do not like it where we are in the universe now, but we can all be certain that we got where we are -our own decisions to expand in love or withdraw from it.

No matter what your spiritual condition is, no matter where you find yourself in the universe, your choice is always the same: to expand your awareness or contract it.