Christ wasn't teaching people to hate Jews. He was a Jew himself. He wasn't teaching people to hate anybody who didn't believe as he did.
If you ask every American out there what kind of a people we are, we would all say, "Oh, we're really good people. We do good things in the world." Then you go around the world and ask what America is like, there's a completely different conceptualization of what we are.
People talk about things happening and it being "unbelievable," and it's exactly the reverse. It's really believable, but we are so conditioned to believe that these kinds of things are just coincidences, that they're just things that show up arbitrarily in our lives, when the fact is that all of us have this kind of guidance available to us.
I was asked on a radio interview what my mission is, and I immediately blurted out, "God realization."
I don't think goal setting is an important basis for a retail business - or for anyone. Most of the time goal setting puts too much energy and attention on being someplace else, instead of helping you appreciate where you are.If I ran a retail store, which I have done in my life, I would go into it from a place of "I am thrilled to be here, and I am honored to be able to serve other people." I would not be telling myself constantly that I have to double my sales in order for me to be happy. I would tell myself, "I am content to be here in this moment, and I love this work."
You are connected to God.You are enjoying every single day you have.Then, the growth of you - and your store, if you have one - will take care of themselves.
I don't think goal setting is an important basis for a retail business. Most of the time goal setting puts too much energy and attention on being someplace else, instead of helping you appreciate where you are.
If I ran a retail store, which I have done in my life, I would go into it from a place of "I am thrilled to be here, and I am honored to be able to serve other people."
When I was growing up, everybody smoked, including me. When I was 14, I started. We all did it. That was just the way it was. And nowadays there's a stigma attached to it. It's a big shift.
See what it is you would like to attract into your life. See how you would like your business to go, your relationships to go, and even your body to go in terms of overcoming addictions and dealing with weight and health issues.
When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"
Well, your whole life is like a checkerboard and there's a sense that you get, especially looking back on it, that you begin to realize and gain awareness that there's something else moving all of these pieces around in your life, and that was really true for me right from the very beginning.
When I go to a music concert, I don't say, "My purpose is to get to the end and enjoy the finale." If that were the purpose, everybody would write finales and nothing more. The purpose of the concert is to enjoy each note as you go along.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not know where the energy and the words come from. I just sit down, and soon it is flowing through my hand and onto the paper.
If we can bring spiritual energy, which is love, kindness, forgiveness and so on, to the problem, we can dissolve it. It's really just a matter of changing our mind about how we're going to process the events in our lives.
Meditation isn't just something we do to make ourselves more peaceful and to take some of the stress out of our lives. We do it because it's the only direct experience we can have of knowing God. Because God is that which is indivisible. Everything else in the universe, in the physical world, is divisible. Up and down, good and bad, right and wrong, male and female, and so on. But that which is indivisible in our physical experience is called silence. And when you get into silence, you're coming to know the indivisibleness of your life - and that's conscious contact.
I think we have to go through everything we go through in our life, and I believe my purpose in life was to teach self-reliance. So I had the experience of relying on myself very early in life in order to have that knowing, because otherwise I would've just read about it. I think of it now as a great advantage that I had. It certainly taught me to rely upon myself at a very young age. And that's what I've been teaching since I was a little boy.
The problem with using force in our lives is that we always create a counterforce. For example, If you're with a child and the child says, "I hate you," which is a very low energy, and you respond with, "I hate you too," you have lowered the collective energy that you are both in, and both of you will he weakened. Whereas, if you respond to, "I hate you," with love, which is what, instinctively, we know what to do, then we can dissolve and dissipate that hatred.
People need to learn how to respond to each other's hatreds with love - which is what Jesus taught us, which is what Buddha came here to teach us, which is what Muhammad taught us, which is what all of the great spiritual masters who have ever walked among us who live at those highest energies taught us - responding to force with more force will just create more problems.
When you live the virtues - when you live in that place of God-consciousness - all these rules we have about cause and effect, beginnings and ends, don't have any impact or relevance.
You have to recognize that God isn't something outside of you - a cosmic bellboy to whom you pray in order to get this or that if you do the right things. Those kinds of understandings are all ego talk. Everybody - you, me, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler - we all came from the same Source. Then we took on these egos and began to practice all kinds of things based in not having reverence for life, whereas that which is God has reverence for all life. All excuses are nothing more than misalignments with God.
I don't think we die. I think our bodies leave, but we can never die. That which is never born, can never die. And that which never changes, can never die.
Nor can you trust in God because everything that you attempt to trust is coming from someone who is not trustworthy to begin with. So everything that you think, feel or act upon is based upon coming from someone who is untrustworthy. Therefore, you'll always be lost.
If you take a glass of water and separate it from its source - the ocean - then pour the water away from its source and ask it to sustain life, it flitters away. It just evaporates. It can't sustain life. That's a metaphor for us when we separate ourselves from our source and believe that God is separate from us.
God is like the ocean and we're like that glass of water. We try to sustain life and do all that the source tells us that we are capable of doing, but if we do it alone, we wither away and collapse instead.
