What is the mind for if not to find God?" he said. "The scriptures assure us that this physical world is a mask, and yet the mask isn't physical. It's made of illusion, and illusion is created by the mind. Do you understand? What the mind has created, only the mind can undo.

We are part of a feedback loop that links our conscious acts to the conscious response of the field. In keeping with Heisenberg's implication, the universe presents the face that the observer is looking for, and when she looks for a different face, the universe changes its mask.

Spiritual teachers tell us if you want to know the state of your personal consciousness, just look around and see what is happening to you. If you want to know the state of the collective consciousness, just look around at what is happening in the world. At any given point in time your personal reality is synchronistically, coincidentally orchestrated by your sense of self.

Reality is an interpretation.

At present the dominant story, collectively speaking, is scientific, and one aspect of the mind is given credit for advancing human evolution: rational thought. If we pity our forebears for their difficulty in getting past superstition and myth, the future may pity us for glorifying the rational mind and neglecting the whole mind.

Of course he could still conjure up the old faces. But they didn't return on their own anymore. In order to see images of Channa or Suddhodana, he would ask to see them. "Learn to use your memories," he told the younger bikkhus. "Don't let them use you.

Clearly the first and most important step in reducing stress is a change of attitude.

To discover who you really are, you must go beyond who you think you are. To find peace, you must go beyond fear. To experience unconditional love, you must go beyond conditional love, the kind that comes and goes.

Finally, the Kingdom of God could never be one thing. It had to serve too many purposes and was entangled in too many aspects of traditional religion. I think the only way to solve the riddles posed by the Kingdom of God is to say that God exists in different places depending on your level of consciousness. This becomes critical on the spiritual path, because as your own awareness shifts, God does, too.

They lost the connection to their bodies, to nature, and to themselves.

What makes it all possible is raising your awareness. What you aren't aware of you can't change.

The only hope for escaping the traps of the conditioned mind is to use its better nature as a thread,