This is the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, and it's a time of great darkness. At the end of this age, there's supposed to be a cosmic dissolution and then life begins anew. It's a wonderful cycle of rebirth.
We live in a world where money is necessary. You can't just go out and roam the forest and the cities, at least in America.
People in the West sometimes have these marvelous visions of India and Tibet. They assume that there are all these sadhus walking around and everybody is breathing enlightenment. Forget it. Don't look at it through rose-colored glasses.
What we are seeking to do is not melt the map of America. We are seeking to melt the self, the solid form that we consider ourselves to be.
Somehow in the middle of the L.A. trendiness, Boston conservation, New York chic and San Francisco intellectual mellow, there's a place where everything meets.
In the West people spend most of their time and energy working. The problem is you are so tired from work that you don't have much energy to meditate - unless you use work in a tantric way.
Self-control is completely necessary for increasing and raising your attention level. One of the places you practice that is at work.
The degree of success that you attain in all of your physical, mental and spiritual undertakings is dependent upon the strength and clarity of your finite mind and your ability to access your infinite mind.
If you meditate you will be able to find new ways to utilize your career and the routines of daily life.
Combine meditation with career as a yoga. You will find that your practice will not be any less powerful than a person who lives in a monastery. You might even excel because practice in a monastery can get very one-sided.
It is necessary to go through all the daily tasks and bring perfection to them, to learn to be perfect in your meditation, and to win in all your endeavors so that one day you will complete again.
Changing the way you dress can make it easier to make deeper changes in the structure of your personality.
Clothes can have a very refined vibration. An ochre robe can be extremely refined and so can a wonderful satin gown or a silk brocade coast.
If you want to create a different character, you can do so just by altering your style of dress and cosmetics.
Clothing is art. It's an expression of how you feel. I think that it's not so much a question of a certain style or designer, but of finding the type of clothing that works well for you.
Life is learning how to deal with traffic. It requires patience, a good sense of timing, and sometimes not giving in to the traffic but reshaping your life.
Clothing has a great deal to do with the attitudes and energy that others direct towards you. I favor the chic, and tend to avoid the trendy. I think that it's good to be chic when possible because it is more inaccessible.
Ideally, you would live in an area that is not necessarily in the middle of the country, out in the woods, because you can isolate yourself there and get stuck in your own thoughts.
I feel that there's a certain danger in always being in a lovely rural setting. You can lose touch.
It's certainly easy to meditate on top of a mountain, but one should be also able to meditate in the heart of the city.
If you want to help people, if you care, go to the cities. The city is where the pain is the greatest - and the cities are a hell of a lot of fun if you like art, movies and plays.
There are millions of little opportunities out there to advance yourself. But you need the personal power to see how to do it.
You can live in the world and have friends, family and possessions. But don't take them all too seriously. Death removes everything. Feel death is every moment, as life is every moment.
Molecules are moving. Universes are colliding. Generations are being born and dying simultaneously, throughout eternity. As one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman, once said: "I contain multitudes."
Life is not dependent upon our classifications and our categories, our science. But we are. We find it interesting and helpful.
