Pleasure is commonly confused for happiness, but the greatest differentiation seems to be one of transience — pleasure comes and goes, but happiness is a stable state of being.

Silence has been widely recognized by poets, philosophers, sages, and mystics as the source of all that is, the starting point of the infinite and unknown that collapses into awareness until each of us can so readily say, 'I am.

The two-sided coin of pain and pleasure keeps the 'I' in force. Most suffering is caused in this unending and troubling cycle, because desire becomes the overriding goal of the self. It wants things, and if it is denied them it becomes angry, frustrated, depressed, violent, sad, anxious, jealous, envious, miserable, boisterous, agitated, divisive, sorrowful, and troublesome. In other words, it is in a conflict that is self-induced and ultimately self- sabotaging.

The mind and brain enable us to be aware of the thoughts and actions that seem to arise and fall, but they do not create consciousness. They are effects of consciousness. All that comes and goes does so within this soup of consciousness.

We have been psychologically and biologically conditioned to accept this life of constant struggle. This is borne of ignorance that the one who struggles and suffers is only a construct, a belief that there is an individual self apart from consciousness.

In consciousness, all realities exist only because the mind is in movement. When the mind becomes completely still, then the reality made possible by the senses, memories, ideas, fears, hopes, and dreams comes to an end. And so does conflict..

The self is a story of who you are. The biological body has no ability to make up any stories, and consciousness has no need to do so. The practical mind merely goes about its business of making practical decisions and thinking without unnecessary emotions. But the self has been forged by millions of years of ideas, experiences, culture, history, biology, evolution, teachers, nature, education, religion, and all manner of influences.

...there is nothing that is truly objective, because all is consciousness, which is an undivided whole. As such, what is termed subjective and objective — the seer and the seen — are fictitious fragments of the whole. Both the seer and the seen are actually perceived aspects of a single consciousness.

The subjective experience is an incalculable, immeasurable personal experience of what it is like to be alive, to exist. It is the feeling of knowing that one exists, no matter how unexplainable or unprovable. This continues to be a thorn in the side of scientists, because science demands proof for everything, yet even the most skeptical scientist knows that he has the subjective experience of knowing what it is like to say, 'I am.

A wave on top of the ocean is still the ocean; it is still made of the same substance. Although it seems to be differentiated, it is still the ocean. It cannot move or change course from the entirety of the ocean, nor can it reorder the ocean so that it can do something that the rest of the water is not doing.