Unique Ways to Succeed and Achieve Your Goals

 I want to share with you just seven little steps that you could take to embark on the most heroic story. That you can imagine for yourself.

 Step one,  become the best listener in the world. There's a conversation going on right now in the world and this is a scary conversation. War, terrorism,  eco-destruction, the extinction of species,  poison in our food chain, and climate change. That's part of the conversation. But there's also another story alongside that.  Are we going to allow extinction the sixth extinction to take place? Or can we together create a story for a more peaceful, just sustainable, healthier, and joyful world?  

Because, as Mahatma Gandhi said, if we can't be the change that we want to see in the world, 

then we'll end up being angry, active angry,  peace advocates, angry peace activists, and that's a contradiction in itself. So listen, listen to the zeitgeist of the moment. 
 

 

Create a vision for yourself. Get together  with people who want to share your vision,bond with them, emotionally complement their  strengths with your strengths. There's nothing that cannot be accomplished when we share a  vision together when we mind emotionally when we compliment each other's strengths. 

We have to do that together. It is your journey  now that is going to help us go in that direction. Even more important, be authentic. Have integrity,  be responsible for your health and the health and joy of others. Recognize that the most valuable things, even though this is  a great university and you're going to get a great degree. But the most valuable things in life  don't come with degrees. They don't come with   credentials. The most valuable things in life  come with your ability to create relationships. 

 

Your ability to nurture love. Your ability to  have empathy and compassion and equanimity and joy. Your desire to evolve in the direction  of truth, goodness, harmony, beauty, peace, and joy. Without that, it is a futile experience.  Not, academia is great because it brings us knowledge, but unless you self-reflect,  unless you ask yourself, Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? What  am I grateful for? What kind of world do I want to live in? What kind of world do I want  future generations to live in? What am I doing to manifest that dream? Does my daily activity in some way reflect the dream that I have?  

 

If we don't ask ourselves those questions, then our life will not have been fruitful.  

 

  The German philosopher Wittgenstein said  

 

'We are asleep. Our Life is a dream.'  We are asleep. Our life is a dream.  

But once in a while, we wake up enough to know  that we are dreaming. So what do we wake up to? 

 

We wake up to the awareness in  which all experience happens.This is an experience right now. But, you know,  the first part of this evening is already over. It's a dream. Five minutes ago  is already over. It's a dream. 

 

A minute ago is already over by the time I get to  the end of my sentence. The first part is over. You can't grasp the bust,  you can't grasp the future and the present is over. As soon as it is born. 

 

So we must wake up. We wake up to the presence in  which this is all happening, experiences and time.But the awareness in which experience  happens is not in time. So I just like you to try something right now as  you're listening to me right now. 

 

Just turn your attention to that, which is  having this experience. Be aware of that  in which this experience is happening. That awareness is the only real thing about  you. Everything else arises and subsides  in every moment of time. Hold on to that. Hold on to the presence in which experience happens and recognize  that experiences in time. But you, that which has the experience is not in time.  The same awareness when you were a baby,  the same awareness when you were a teenager now,  and because it's not in time, we are told by the great luminaries of all time. The sages of the  Upanishads that this awareness that you are is not subject to birth or death.  

When that alone is. So without  that self-awareness, life could go by as a dream. But to wake up to it is the goal of our life.  Waking up to presence, waking up to spirit, waking up to our soul cannot be done through a  system of thought, be it religion or philosophy or theology or science, because reality is  not a system of thought. Reality is that which gives rise to thought, and as  we trace thought back to its source, we realize it is also the source of perception. It is also the source of the feeling.  

 

 It is also the source of everything that happens in our  life. Our personal relationships, our social interactions that which we call the  world the universe it arises in subsides in our own being. And that is the highest  intelligence. Being is the highest intelligence, feeling comes after that. Feeling that we call  love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and then thinking, but not dogmatic thinking, but living  the questions, and if we live, the questions and life moves us into the answers. And  finally, the last is doing. We're living in a society today where everybody is doing,  doing, doing bundles of conditioned reflexes  and nerves, constantly being triggered by people  and circumstances into predictable outcomes. We're algorithms. We are biological robots because  we have not woken up to that in which all experience happens.

 

  So I shall close now. Wish  you good luck. Godspeed. But don't forget, don't forget that God's language  is silence, and everything else is poor translation.