"[T]he years that you spend as a nobody are painful but golden, because no one bothers to lie to you. The moment you're a somebody, you have your last truth. Everyone will try to spin you--as they should, with careers to think of." It is a blessing to interact with those who don't respect us, as it reveals much about their nature and how they perceive us; as well as our nature by virtue of how we react to them. In a society where people are politically correct to the point where even close friends don't speak openly about personal matters, no one knows who they or anyone else is....

Many years back, on a wintery evening, when my son, Max, was maybe 8, we walked passed some homeless men setting up their cardboard sleeping surfaces under an overhang at the foot of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church on 5th Avenue and 55th Street in New York City. Seeing their presumably difficult lives with few choices, I commented: "When you grow up, if you don't work hard, this is a type of prison where you can wind up." To which Max replied: "Maybe they don't mind." Simple, yet profound. Perhaps I was a prisoner of a bourgeois mindset and the homeless men were simply living from one day to the next, making the best of their circumstances, without thinking about bourgeois-prized creature comforts and societal roles the mind makes many crave....

When we see solely and carefully with our eyes, everything is unique, beautiful and real. When we see with our mind, we can only compare things as our mind can't see. Comparisons make one thing beautiful relative to another thing which we then see as not beautiful. As what our minds sees as beautiful is exceptional, our mind has us seeing most things as not beautiful. Moreover, what we see with our mind is an illusion; though we often forget that it's not real. In conclusion, when we don't see the beauty of everything about us, our mind must be working. We should give it a rest and everything will be the beautiful....

The universe is a circle that's divided into two parts whose percentages of the whole change over time. One part is our self, the other part is the universe. For much of our time, the self is the bigger part; so big, we barely notice the universe part. However, when our body dies and the self it carries disappears, the universe is all of the circle. Our self becomes much of the circle because it gets much of our attention. It does so by manipulating us into thinking that everyone else's priority is their self and, if we don't like others prioritize our self, others will view us as odd, shun us and we will be alone; others might even destroy us. Afraid, we pay much attention to our self. Our self then grows until we no longer see the universe. However, if we give the universe our attention, it will grow and grow until we will barely notice our self. It is then we realize we are one with the universe, our true identity. Social, religious, professional, national and personal identities, as well as our karma, are the hallmarks of self. These identities capture our attention. However, we can free ourselves from our selves by simply sitting quietly and gazing at the night sky, the eternally-changing and never-ending universe, until it overwhelms our selves. Then, we are at peace beyond words as we realize our true identity. As the night sky is now nearly invisible in populated areas and much of our attention is taken by our connecting with others which in turn reinforces our self identities, meditation is another path to experiencing the divine universe, realizing our true identity. In meditation, we focus on the space between breaths; the space of nothingness from where every-thing comes and before time begins....

Awakened, we can see the universe as light bouncing off the surfaces of objects and projecting into our eyes without the distortions created by the lens of the self. Enlightened, we realize the light we are seeing is generated from within us, not without us....