Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked.

Extraordinary things like this occur frequently to most of us, but we disregard them, because of our lack of understanding, and we think they are mere coincidences.

All you have to do to find a way out of your self-imposed prison is to retrain your thinking.

Great performers in all fields seem immune to what outsiders think about them. Their sense of themselves never depends on the feedback—positive or negative—they get from the environment.

"This is the manner of noble souls: they do not want to have anything for nothing; least of all, life. Whoever is of the mob wants to live for nothing; we others, however, to whom life gave itself, we always think about what we might best give in return...

One should not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy."

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Thinking is the hardest and most exhausting of all labor; and hence many people shrink from it.

You can actually shift your thinking in such a way as to make a wrong decision or mistake an impossibility.

Thought is cause: experience is effect. If you don't like the effects in your life, you have to change the nature of your thinking.

Thinking is growth; we cannot think without growing.

…we aren’t responsibility for creating all the bad things that happen to us.  But we can claim responsibility for the bad things that happen and learn a lot about ourselves by doing so.  It all depends on whether you think of responsibility as something you are or as something you do. For us, the onlyuseful way of thinking about responsibility is as something we do. We use an operational definition of responsibility, not a theoretical one: Responsibility is an action you take, not a quality that can be assigned. A judge and jury can assign responsibility to a criminal for an act, but that criminal’s life will not begin to change until he or she makes a conscious choice to take responsibility… 

The key point is this: There is tremendous healing power in taking responsibility for something right now in the present, but no healing value in looking back to the past to blame yourself or anyone else.

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