I talked about the benefits of meditation and I wondered if I was a fraud.

But, I have started to see more and more.

I see the energy flowing through my body as I sing. I see the auras around plants and animals. I feel the connections between all things.

I know that all is one and I love being a part of life in this world.

Seeing is wonderful. Allow yourself to open up and truly know the wonders of the spirit. It is amazing.

The Divine lives within us all.

This is not an exaggeration. This is not a metaphor. This is literal.

As we live, as we breathe, as we move the Divine is with us.

The Divine lives through us. Life is the Divine finding new, unique ways to express itself.

Every breath brings new life into me.

Every breath connects me to the world around me.

I know that it is a blessing and an honor to simply be able to draw breath.

I am so glad to be alive.

All matter and all motion ultimately come from love.

The stars and the planets are all love.

All life is love given flesh.

I have gone beyond feeling love to being love.

I am love incarnate.

People have an inner perfection, an inner purity, a core of love and peace and goodwill. If someone is out of balance they will return to that perfect state if given time and peace and a bit of trust. You cannot rush this process. It is a personal thing.

The desire to fix people is a dangerous deception. It lies in the idea that there is something wrong with people that they cannot fix themselves. This mistrust is dangerous. When people see this mistrust it makes them doubt themselves and their own abilities and can very easily send them deeper into the problem that you are trying to fix. Expect failure and failure becomes more likely. Expect success and success becomes more likely. Attempts to use force to bring someone to love and peace are dangerous, foolish and counterproductive.

Expect the best of people and you will find it. Treat people as superior and they become superior.

There is a reason that people do not like to be meddled with. Even when someone needs help to overcome a problem or to heal, they need to come to that realization on their own. If they come to it on their own, it’s still a personal thing. By waiting for them to come to their own realization you show that you trust them and your trust helps them learn to trust themselves. If someone is going to quit a bad habit that desire must come from within, it cannot be forced. Attempts to force growth and force healing are counterproductive. People grow up and mature in their own times and at their own pace. Trust them to do so when the time is right for them.

The only way to be sure that your attempts to help are truly helpful and not leading to greater distress is to allow the one who needs help to decide if and when they need help.

Not only is meddling counterproductive it is usually a sign of serious imbalances in yourself. Generally speaking the ones who are most desperate to fix those around them are those who are most insecure in themselves. It is guilt and shame for wrongs of the past or present in the “fixer” that needs to be dealt with rather than anything external. It is a feeling of personal weakness which makes someone desperate to make other stronger. Energy wasted trying to fix other people frequently needs to be put into self-improvement.

If we all focused on fixing ourselves instead of focusing so much on those around us, especially on those who don’t want our help, we could get so much more done.

We all fail from time to time. If you need success to be happy then you are doomed to disappointment from time to time. But, when you embrace even the negative side and make success and failure equally good in your mind, then happiness is assured.

You could be injured. You could be paralyzed. No matter how strong you are you can become weak. If your happiness depends on strength it is temporary and can be taken away from you in an instant.

There are times that every one of us is left alone. Every experience is personal and cannot really be shared. The people that you love may die at any moment. Embrace aloneness. Learn to love being by yourself. If with people and without people are equally good to you, then happiness is assured.

Some lives have a relatively big impact and some people leave barely a ripple. We try to be and feel important, but on a cosmic scale all our actions are insignificant. In a million years it’s doubtful that there will be any record of any of us. In 100 million it approaches certainty that we will all be forgotten. From a certain perspective we are all insignificant. Embrace that insignificance because when it no longer matters what and how much you accomplish then joy can enter your being. It’s only through no longer caring about accomplishments that true unconditional love can enter your heart.

We all get hurt from time to time, sometimes a little and sometimes severely. Moments of pleasure are fleeting and do not last. So long as we cling to pleasure and fear pain our joy is limited and fragile. Pain can come at any moment, but we can love and embrace pain when it comes to us.

Life is brief. A beautiful flash and then it’s gone. On a cosmic scale our lives are so brief as to barely be discernable. So long as life is superior to death, there will be fear. If you believe death is terrible you cannot avoid a constant gnawing fear. It may hide in your subconscious, but it will always be with you. Only by loving life and death equally is there freedom.

Even freedom can be a fetter. It possible that the freedoms we have could be taken away. Our nation could collapse. We could be conquered and enslaved. If our happiness depends on freedom then we are slaves to our need for freedom and are not truly free.

It is only by embracing the whole of the universe, the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows, suffering and pleasure, activity and stillness, life and death and making all the opposites that exist equally valuable and equally good in our own minds that we can truly be freed from suffering. It is by letting go of attachment and clinging to the positive, pleasant aspects that we find liberation. It is by viewing each and every experience as equally good and equally perfect that we find pure joy. It is through embracing the things we fear and seeing them as equally good that fear vanishes and only peace remains.

If you need a reason to be happy your happiness is limited. Let go of all reasons and you can find pure and perfect joy.

There is a reason people refer to transcendence. Pure love and perfect joy are infinite and eternal. They are outside of cause and effect. They are outside of good and bad. Love is beyond time and place. Once you see and truly accept this fact, you find that you can be happy any time and any place.

Joy does not need wealth. Happiness does not need pleasure. Love does not need immense strength or unparalleled beauty.

I’m not saying that wealth or strength or beauty are bad, just that they are ultimately unnecessary. You do not need them to be joyous.

The more that you buy into the idea that you need these things and the more that you require yourself to have in order to feel happy the more miserable you will be. High standards are the enemy of joy and peace and happiness. Perfect unconditional love brings perfect peace. Accepting things the way that they are, however good or bad they may be, brings joy.

Everything that exists in this universe will one day end. Our bodies will die. Our civilizations will perish. The world will be consumed by the sun. The sun will burn out and die.

If your joy depends on any of these things you are bound for disappointment.

But, things don’t need to last forever. We don’t need eternity. We don’t need anything.

There is nothing that you need to be happy. You also do not need to be without to be happy. If your joy is truly transcendental having and not having are equal to you. Neither is superior, both are superior. Superiority is meaningless to unconditional love because superiority is a condition, goodness and badness are conditions (and are relative anyway), .

Perfect happiness depends on nothing. It is without cause and therefore beyond cause and effect.

It’s better to be too gentle than too hard. You can always try harder later and all you’ve lost is a little time. If you try too hard there can be serious damage done and you lose more time in healing just to get back to level than you would have by just trying harder later. The same is true both with yourself and with others, until you find the place of perfect balance a truly compassionate person will ere on the side of too gentle.

It’s better too slow than too fast. It’s important to conserve your energy for when you need it. It’s important to pace yourself. If you take your time and do things right the first time you can end up saving time since there are fewer mistakes to correct, but rushing results in mistakes and injury.

It’s better too patient than too impatient. Remember, healing, growth, maturity and evolution all take time. It’s true of the body, it’s true of the mind and it’s true of the soul. Just wanting to get better at something doesn’t make it happen all at once. Some of the most beautiful things in nature are rock formations that take tens of thousands of years to develop. Stalactites and stalagmites grow one drop at a time, the inches accumulating over thousands of years. But, impatience leads to recklessness, rushing and mistakes. If you had a broken leg that was healing it’s better to be patient and let it heal, no matter how much you want to get up and go. Progress can easily be undone by impatience.

It’s better to be lazy than over-ambitious. Over-ambitious people exhaust themselves and those around them. Countless lives have been ruined and lost in the name of ambition. Marriages and families fall apart all the time because of ambition. `There is a great deal of unnecessary stress and pain that comes from pushing too hard too fast. Many masters would appear lazy to an outsider because they know how to conserve their energy for what really matters to them. If you can train yourself to be happy with nothing you will be far happier than if you are always aching for more.

It’s better to do too little than too much. There is only so much that you can do in a day. No matter how capable you are you still have limits as to what you can accomplish. If you take on too many responsibilities things will get missed and problems will arise. At the very least, you will be exhausted and exhausted people to get upset by little things and generate conflict. If you find you have extra time and energy that you’d like to find something productive to do it’s easy to find things to fill the time, but getting rid of responsibilities and out of commitments is much harder. Also, if you’ve exhausted yourself you have no energy left in case of emergency.

It’s better too cautious than too brave. Few people have died because they refused to do something reckless. There may be many thrilling experience that we can have by being brave, but are those thrills worth your health or your life? Every time you risk your life is a gamble, previous safety is not a guarantee of future safety. If you gamble long enough you are bound to lose.

It’s better too quiet than too loud. Quiet never damaged anyone’s ears. Few people are bothered by quiet. Generally speaking, the more you talk the less you listen. You can’t really learn new information from yourself. You can contemplate, theorize and recombine what you already have, but new information comes from new experiences, from study and from listening to other people. If you are talking you are more likely to miss things going on around you. There are things which are said which cannot be unsaid. Better to listen, no matter how wrong a person is, than to respond and escalate a situation.

It’s better too humble than too prideful. People do not tend to get angry at those who have little and are humble. But, there are always people who are resentful of those who have more than themselves, even if they’ve never met. Someone who brags only makes the problem worse and can alienate those around them.

It’s better to let go than to insist. Conflict ends when one person surrenders. So long as two people both insist on opposing view they will remain in conflict. As soon as one person surrenders the fight ends. A willingness to give up is essential to gaining and maintaining peace.

It’s better to give up than to hold on. You may or may not be able to stop a thief. Trying is likely to result in injury and maybe even death for someone. Every thief suffers from a lack, whether it’s food to survive or confidence and education to do another line of work or the restraint necessary to avoid risky behaviors. If you choose to feel sorry for them instead of angry, if you forgive instead of holding a grudge, if you make that which is stolen a gift in your own mind you can spare yourself the anger and feeling of weakness.

Whatever has been taken, whatever harm is done, become willing to give or willing to do without and anger, blame, resentment and conflict all fade away. Acceptance and peace come in letting go of the desire for things to be other than they are. All it takes to find peace yourself is to let go and truly believe that life is fine the way it is. The instant that you allow yourself to believe that everything is all right, right now, the way things are you will find peace. Sure there are problems to overcome and there will always be problems to overcome. So long as there is life there will be problems, there will be challenges and there will be pain. But, that there are problems is not a problem and in no way changes the fundamental perfection of right here, right now.

Allow yourself to believe that life is wonderful just the way it is and for you it becomes so.

Believe that life is amazing just as it is and you will never be without amazement.

Love unconditionally and you will never be without love.

But, here we can find the secret of happiness. If goodness exists in the mind, if it is in fact an idea then it can be changed. There is no human who has ever lived who does not have the ability to change their mind. Decisions change. People grow and adapt. Ideas and thought processes can be molded.

If we want all of life to be good, then all we have to do is believe that all life is good. Set aside the evidence of your senses. In terms of deciding goodness they are an illusion and will mislead you. It is too easy to believe pleasant to be good and painful to be bad. It is easy to mistake beauty for goodness. It is easy to mistake apparent stability with permanence. This is why the mystics say “The world is an illusion.” Set it aside and choose to believe that all is good.

Cultivate transcendent unconditional love. Accept and believe that nothing has the power to disturb you and you become unable to be disturbed. Believe that all is perfect as it is and to you it is. When you have perfect faith in the perfect goodness of all things you will be free of fear and full of transcendent joy and peace.

Call it divine light. Call it unformed infinity. Call it pure transcendent love. All these things are true.

Look deep inside yourself and you will see.

Relax and look and you can know.

It is there. It has always been there. It is beautiful.

Inside us all there is a purity that cannot be defiled. No matter that problems that we see, inside there is perfection and perfection is the truth of things. Our senses deceive us, make us think that we are limited. We see flaws and think that they are real. But, the perfection is truth and the flaws are illusion. This world we see around us is just one manifestation of divine light. All that is comes from perfection and perfection is our true nature.