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.

You do not need to do anything first to be enlightened.

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.

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.

No matter what happens, I am conscious all the time.

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.

Whether I feel it or not, I am one with all the love in the universe.