Living a spiritual life is a strategy for working on yourself for the benefit of all beings.

That is another way of saying that the optimum thing you can do for someone else is to work on yourself – not out of some idealistic sense of altruism, but because getting to Oneness for yourself means resolving your sense of Separateness.

Use every situation you have with other people as a vehicle to work on yourself. See where you get stuck, where you push, where you grab, where you judge, where you do all the other stuff. Use your life experiences as your curriculum.

The deeper impulse of every relationship is to evoke the Love and Oneness that unites us. What actually happens is that many relationships reinforce our Separateness because of our misperception of ourselves as separate beings, and because of our desire systems, which are based on Separateness or Ego.

Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.

Relationships and emotions can reinforce Separateness, or they can be the reason for your awakening. When it comes to Love relationships you are like a bee looking for a flower.

The predicament is that the emotional power of loving somebody can get you so caught in the interpersonal melodrama that you can not get beyond the emotion.

The problem with interpersonal Love is that you are dependent on the other person to reflect Love back to you. That is part of the illusion of Separateness. The reality is that Love is a state of being that comes from within.

The only thing you really ever have to offer another person is your own state of being.

When you are not entrapped by another person’s appearance or behavior, you can see behind all that to a deeper level of their being because your mind has tuned itself; you have shifted your focus just that little bit to see their soul. That soul quality is Love.

Prolong not the past. Invite not the future. Do not alter your innate wakefulness. Do not fear not appearances. – Ram Dass