Nick DiMaggio’s Reviews > The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment > Status Update

The more you seek happiness, the more it will elude you. Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy.

The first thing to remember is this: As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.

To know yourself as the being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

Hence, the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world.

Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame, there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind.

The wider the time gap between perception and thought, the more depth there is to you as a human being, which is to say the more conscious you are.

When you are on a journey, it is certainly helpful to know where you are going or at least the general direction in which you are moving, but don’t forget: The only thing that is ultimately real about your journey is the step you are taking at this moment. That’s all there ever is.

When your deeper sense of self is derived from being, when you are free of “becoming” as a psychological need, neither your happiness nor your sense of self depends on the outcome, and so there is freedom from the fear. You don’t demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don’t live up to your expectations.

Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.