When you take that love outside, remember this: we talk about loving others in the multitudes, but who are you really loving? You’re only loving yourself. So it’s good enough if you can at least cause no harm to others. Be within yourself and learn to love and perfect yourself. If you spend enough time loving yourself and the Jesus inside you, or the Ramakrishna inside you, or the Buddha or the Allah inside you, then that love will grow and blossom within you. Then it’s very easy to love others. So you think, so you become.

Going forward, when you open your mouth to yell at somebody, you should know immediately that that is coming back to you. That is also self-love. Self-love is understanding the higher principles of a human life, the laws that we’re bound by and have to live within. I’ll tell you, there is self-forgiveness and there is self-acceptance. If you can work on these alone you will grow in love. You will have this love for yourself. Then the more God-work you do, naturally love for yourself will come because you begin to have such beautiful feelings inside you, such tenderness inside you, such compassion inside you, such sweetness that you say, “Yeah, I love me because I’m pretty lovable.”

"Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."

Do not go where the path may lead.  Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

There are people who sit there their entire lives in the lotus position and breath in and out. They can sit there until they die, but without practicing in the physical world what they are experiencing in meditation, they will not progress spiritually beyond that point. One must practice in the physical realm and become a walking, living, breathing meditator. Not a person just sitting with their eyes closed, but the meditator with his eyes open in the world and acting in the world from a place of peace, silence, stillness and most importantly the place of being a witness. Only then does one become a true meditator in life. Until that time they are just practicing, they are still just practicing.

Da Free John's phrase kept running through my mind: "Practice the wound of love... practice the wound of love." Real love hurts; real love makes you totally vulnerable and open; real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you. I kept thinking, if love does not shatter you, you do not know love...

We are masters because we have the power to create and to rule our own lives.

When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.

Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness. This is the I Am that is deeper than name and form.

True listening is another way of bringing stillness into the relationship. When you truly listen to someone, the dimension of stillness arises and becomes an essential part of the relationship. But true listening is a rare skill. Usually, the greater part of a person’s attention is taken up by their thinking. At best, they may be evaluating your words or preparing the next thing to say. Or they may not be listening at all, lost in their own thoughts.

True listening goes far beyond auditory perception. It is the arising of alert attention, a space of presence in which the words are being received. The words now become secondary. They may be meaningful or they may not make sense. Far more important than what you are listening to is the act of listening itself, the space of conscious presence that arises as you listen. That space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer “other.” In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.