People think that their life will only be perfect when they have achieved everything they want, when everything is completely going the way they want it to go. They are looking at the perfect state of life as something that is in the future, that they don’t have it now but they need to move towards it. The truth is even when they have reached that state, there will still be new desires that will arise to be achieved. It is an illusion to think that the perfect life is something in the future instead of being present with us.

Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.
— Physicist Nick Herbert

When my doctoral student Vincent Paquette and I first began studying the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns at the Université de Montréal, we knew that our motives were quite likely to be misunderstood.

Vedanta, one of the world’s most ancient philosophies, says there are only five reasons why humans suffer: not knowing who we are, identifying with our ego or self-image, clinging to the transient and unreal, recoiling in fear of the transient and unreal, and fear of death. Vedanta also says that the five causes of suffering are all contained in the first cause – not knowing who we are.

If someone were to ask, “Who are you?” your response would probably be “My name is so-and-so. I’m American, or I’m the president of this company. You may also identify with your body, “This bag of flesh and bones is who I am.” But sensory experience is totally illusory. You may think you are the body that your senses can locate in space and time, but the body is a field of invisible vibrations that has no boundaries in space and time.

We are never truly more alive than when we live in a state of constant awe of everything that exists in the universe. The very fact that anything exist at all is a miracle. Life itself is a miracle. It is a gift that we are here and to be aware of our being here. It is also a gift that everything else is also here for us to know and experience it. Every moment that passes, the continual existence of all things in the universe is a continual miracle that we are experiencing.