The barrier between us and that sublime experience is our mind and the quality of awareness it generates. We are the victim or the victor of our own mind.

The same mind, which causes distraction, dissipation, turmoil, insecurity, delusion, hatred, anger, fear, panic and dread​, ​can create courage, stability, confidence, security, love, concentration, single-pointedness, and calmness within us. 

External circumstances are not at all responsible for the quality of our experience. That depends entirely on what is stored within us in the different layers of our mind. It is not the spouse or the job, the home or the children, the riches or poverty, health or sickness, gain or loss that determine our happiness or despair. It is simply the quality of our mind that generates what we experience. The secret, therefore, lies in harnessing the mind through the continuous practice of awareness and steering it onto the path of transcendental knowledge.

As consciousness evolves into the manifest world and assumes form and substance, it loses its continuity in terms of awareness. This continuity of consciousness is the secret for attaining higher states of awareness. If we can stop the mental fluctuation and revive the experience of continuity of consciousness, then we will attain the goal we have set out to achieve. 

We can have that experience here and now, this very moment, because we do not have to introduce any extraneous factor from outside. That unbroken, untainted and pure stream of consciousness is already flowing within us, but we are unaware of it on account of the external and fragmented focus of the mind. 

We become victims of our mind, when we identify with its contents and get carried away. Instead, we should be a witness to the contents and raise our awareness level.    

Pleasure and pain alternate. The body can’t be happy or unhappy. The “one” who is happy or unhappy is the finite ego. The proof of this lies in the deep sleep state of consciousness. Happiness and misery, joys and sorrows, and pleasures and pains of waking and dream state of consciousness never touch us in the deep sleep state, because they belong to the finite ego and the ego is​ temporarily ​unmanifest or in the seed form, in the deep sleep state. Our existence is independent of the presence or absence of the finite ego. 

Liberation is the freedom from the alternating sense of happiness and unhappiness. Liberation is the total final awareness that there is no doer, no experiencer — only the absolute, infinite, eternal bliss.

What is our happiness worth when we have to strive and labor for it, perspire for it? True happiness is spontaneous and effortless and independent of all external and internal factors. What we can seek and find in space, time and objects, that is, in any particular place, in any particular time and in any particular object is not the real thing. We have to discover what we have never lost; we have to discover the inalienable.

We are pure blissful awareness. Since we are awareness there’s no need to attain or cultivate it. All we have to do is to give up being aware of other things, that is the not-self. If one gives up being aware of all that is not-self, then pure blissful awareness alone remains, and that is our Real Self.  

Once we know with absolute certainty that nothing can trouble us but our own imagination, we come to disregard​ the projections of​ our​ mind like​ desires and fears, concepts and ideas, and live by the truth of our own Real Self.