You are not your depression. You are not your anxiety or stress. That is but a strange kind of trick of the mind, a strange kind of illusion. You have deluded yourself into thinking— though you are not aware of it—that you are your depression, that you are your anxiety, that you are the thrills that you have. You so much more than a transient emotion.

I want to give you a taste of the difference between analysis and awareness, or information on the one hand and insight on the other. I want to show how information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the former UN Secretary-General, put it so beautifully: “God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.” We don’t have to quarrel about a word, because “God” is only a word, a concept. One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, about concepts, about judgments. Drop them you will the reality of God everywhere.

When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live.  Desire breeds anxiety but we don't want to see it. But when you’ve suffered sufficiently, then you will be ready to see it.

If the eye is unobstructed, it results in sight; if the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing; if the nose is unobstructed, the result is a sense of smell; if the mouth is unobstructed, the result is a sense of taste; if the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom. Looking for more... Follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/demellocenter/

Listening to this podcast could be the most important few minutes in your lives. If you could grasp it, you’d hit upon the secret of awakening. You would be happy forever. You would never be unhappy again. Nothing would have the power to upset you again. Nothing.

"Silence is the great revelation, " said Lao-tse. We are accustomed to think of Scripture as the revelation of God. And so it is.  I want you now to discover the revelation that silence brings. To take in the revelation that Scripture offers, you must expose yourself to Scripture. To take in the revelation that silence offers you must first attain silence. And this is not easy. Let us attempt to do this in this exercise.

One cannot say anything about the awakened state; one can only talk about the sleeping state. One hints at the awakened state. One cannot say anything about happiness. Happiness cannot be defined. What can be defined is misery. Drop unhappiness and you will know. Love cannot be defined; un-love can. Drop un-love, drop fear, and you will know. We want to find out what the awakened person is like. But you’ll know only when you get there.

Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. That is extremely important for the process of change. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come back to life.

We filter out life constantly, so much so that often we don’t see the reality of what is there. Where does the filtering come from? It's our conditioning, our culture, our programming.  It's the way we were taught to see things and to experience life. Even the words we choose function as filters. There’s another demon doing the filtering, distorting and destroying true perception, haunting us with fear.  It's the one called attachment. That filter is the root of all suffering.