Do not carry the burden of the past; do not live in the future.
The only important thing is that one lives in the present authentically
and fully.
Whatever your current life is, be the most you can be by living in the
moment.

One popular human strategy for dealing with difficulty is autosuggestion: when something nasty pops up, you convince yourself it is not there, or you convince yourself it is pleasant rather than unpleasant. The Buddha's tactic is quite the reverse. Rather than hide it or disguise it, the Buddha's teaching urges you to examine it to death. Buddhism advises you not to implant feelings that you don't really have or avoid feelings that you do have. If you are miserable you are miserable; that is the reality, that is what is happening, so confront that.  Look it square in the eye without flinching. When you are having a bad time, examine that experience, observe it mindfully, study the phenomenon and learn its mechanics. The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, learn how it is built. You do this by taking the thing apart piece by piece. The trap can't trap you if it has been taken to pieces. The result is freedom.

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of  the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast

It is never too late.
Even if you are going to die tomorrow,
Keep yourself straight and clear and be a happy human being today.
If you keep your situation happy day by day,
you will eventually reach the greatest happiness of Enlightenment.

If your spiritual practice and the demands of your everyday life are not in harmony, it means there's something wrong with the way you are practicing.
Your practice should satisfy your dissatisfied mind while providing solutions to the problems of everyday life.
If it doesn't, check carefully to see what you really understand about your religious practice.

Religion is not just some dry intellectual idea but rather your basic philosophy of life: you hear a teaching that makes sense to you, find through experience that it relates positively with your psychological makeup, get a real taste of it through practice, and adopt it as your spiritual path.
That's the right way to enter the spiritual path.

When Lord Buddha spoke about suffering, he wasn't referring simply to superficial problems like illness and injury, but to the fact that the dissatisfied nature of the mind itself is suffering. No matter how much of something you get, it never satisfies your desire for better or more. This unceasing desire is suffering; its nature is emotional frustration.

Be gentle first with yourself - if you wish to be gentle with others.

We are not compelled to meditate by some outside agent, by other people, or by God.
Rather, just as we are responsible for our own suffering, so are we solely responsible for our own cure.
We have created the situation in which we find ourselves, and it is up to us to create the circumstances for our release.

I have discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color - something which exists before all forms and colors appear.  This is a very important point.  No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea...  In constantly seeking to actualize your ideal, you will have no time for composure.  But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing... then at that moment you will have perfect composure.

All sentient beings - all holons in fact - contain Buddha-nature - contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit - and thus we are all members of the council of all beings… And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

I keep calling it the I-thought. It's a thought. There is no I. This
gives you a clue.

Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present....Nobody chooses dysfunction, conflict, pain. Nobody chooses insanity. They happen because there is not enough presence in you to dissolve the past, not enough light to dispel the darkness. You are not fully here. You have not quite woken up yet. In the meantime, the conditioned mind is running your life.

The typical New Age notion is that you want good things to happen to you, so think good thoughts; and because you

create your own reality, those thoughts will come true. Conversely, if you are sick, it’s because you have been bad.

The mystical notion, on the other hand, is that your deepest Self transcends both good and bad, so by accepting
absolutely everything that happens to you - by equally embracing both good and bad with equanimity - you can

transcend the ego altogether. “The idea is not to have one thing that is good smash into another thing called my ego

but to simply rise above both."