God says, “Give me your heart.” And then, in answer to my puzzlement, I hear him say, “Your heart is where your treasure is.” My treasures—here they are:  persons...places...occupations ...things ... experiences of the past... the future’s hopes and dreams. I pick each treasure up, starting with the past and something near me says, " In the measure that your heart is in past treasures you are fossilized and dead, and then it moves to the next treasure with yet another admonition. 

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We look to gurus, writers, friends, surroundings to give us peace or fortitude or meaning in our life. But these external agents can never be a substitute for inner, deeper sources.

When the Messiah came his people failed to see him.He’s still around. When did you see him last?

Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism. There are three types of selfishness. The first type is the one where I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself. That’s what we generally call self-centeredness. The second is when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. That would be a more refined kind of selfishness. The third is I give something, I get something. That’s beautiful. That’s true. That’s real. That isn’t charity, that’s enlightened self-interest.

Spiritual greed makes us attached to peace. We are saying, “Unless I’m peaceful, I won’t be happy.” Did it ever occur to you that you could be happy in tension? Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.  You will never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself. The harder you try to change yourself, the worse it gets. You are called upon to be aware. Let tension or the calmness take care of itself. Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality.

We’ve been taught to look for our happiness in outside things: money, power, romance, approval. That’s the first thing we need to understand if we want to come awake, which is the same thing as saying: if we want to love, if we want freedom, if we want joy and peace and spirituality. In that sense, spirituality is the most practical thing in the whole wide world. I challenge anyone to think of anything more practical than spirituality as I have defined it—not piety, not devotion, not religion, not worship, but spirituality—waking up, waking up!

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Happiness is your natural state. It is coming home to yourself simply by observing yourself.  Does that sound a bit tedious? It's not.  Self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness, which is the experience of your essential nature. Everything changes and you become oriented to awareness instead of to suffering.

A big part of why our life is a mess. It's because we don’t want to be happy; we don’t want to be at peace. We've been programmed by society want other things. Money, power, reputation. Admit it! You've been trained to believe that you cannot be happy  until or unless you get this thing or that person and this result. The irony is you are happy already but don't know it.

Where does self-worth comes from, Anthony DeMello asks: "Do you get it from success in your work? Do you get it from having a lot of money? Do you get it from attracting a lot of men if you’re a woman or a lot of women if you’re a man?"  How fragile all that is, how transitory.

Do not suppress desire, because desire is energy and the more energy we have, the better.  Don’t seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire. See them for what they are worth. Because if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at it and see and understand how you may be preparing the ground for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into simply a preference.