This book is beyond anything that I have ever read before. It is remarkably relevant and true in it’s message and the way that it is written is outstanding. I know it’s getting huge amounts of hype because it’s on Oprah’s book club list, but it completely deserves the recognition it is receiving a thousand times over. This book is life-affirming; it is unfathomably accurate. And the irony behind it is that the message is so simple, it isn’t a complex conundrum of trickery or some mass secret formula. It’s very basic. Human kind just needs to stop for a moment; stop thinking, stop doing, stop analyzing, and just be. Just concentrate on being.
"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge."
"’I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them.’ That is the fate of the ego."
"A large part of many people’s lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation."
"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness."
"The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am."
"Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself."
"Non reaction is not weakness but strength. The more reactive you are, the more entangled you become with form. The more identified with form, the stronger the ego."
"Ego takes everything personally. Emotion arises, defensiveness, perhaps even aggression. Are you defending the truth? No, the truth, in any case, needs no defense."
"Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation."
"Spiritual realization is to see clearly that what I perceive, experience, think, or feel is ultimately not who I am, that I cannot find myself in all those things that continuously pass away."
"Ask yourself this: am I losing myself in what happens, losing myself in the mind, in the world?"
"A very common role is the one of victim, and the form of attention it seeks is sympathy or pity or others’ interest in my problems, ’me and my story.’ Once one is identified with a story in which they assigned to themselves the role of victim, they do not want it to end, and so, the ego does not want an end to its ’problems’ because they are part of its identity. If no one will listen to ’my sad story’, they can tell it to themselves in their heads, over and over and over, and feel sorry for themselves , and so have an identity as someone who is being treated unfairly by life or other people, fate or God."
"Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself. Give up defining yourself- to yourself or to others. When others define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem."
"Unhappiness is an ego-created mental-emotional disease that has reached epidemic proportions."
"You might say ’What a dreadful day,’ without realizing that the cold, the wind, and the rain or whatever condition you react to are not dreadful. They are as they are. What is dreadful is your reaction, your inner resistance to it, and the emotion that is created by that resistance."
"Listen to people’s stories and they could all be entitled ’Why I Cannot Be At Peace Now.’"
"You are the light of Presence, the awareness that is prior to and deeper than any thoughts and emotions."
"When unconscious people defend there opinions (thoughts), they feel and act as if they were defending their very self. There attitude is ’I need to win at all cost lest I become annihilated.’ That’s the illusion."
"Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?"
"The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. And so the story is not recognized as such but is taken to be reality."
"The joy of Being, which is the only true happiness, cannot come to you through any form, possession, achievement, person, or event, through anything that happens. That joy cannot come to you, ever. It emanates from the formless dimension within you, from consciousness itself and thus is one with who you are."
"The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought."
"Unless Being flows into doing, unless you are present, you lose yourself in whatever you do. You also lose yourself in thinking, as well as in your reactions to what happens externally."