Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in ‘just being’. Allow nature to teach you stillness. When you look at a tree and perceive its stillness, you become still yourself.

When you perceive nature only through the mind, through thinking, you cannot sense its aliveness, its beingness. When you perceive nature, let there be spaces of no thought, no mind. You reconnect with nature in the most intimate and powerful way by becoming aware of your breathing and learning to hold your attention there. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

Whatever you manifest is the icing on the cake because you already have the cake, you are the cake, if you don’t realize that then life is frustrating because even whatever you do manifest if you think that’s the cake it’s not going to satisfy you for long, it might even make you sick if you eat too much cake, it may make you sick, so the cake is the essence of who you are, it is the presence.

Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

There are two dimensions to this moment here, the words and the presence, the presence is nothing to do with words or thinking, it is formless, you can't say, aww there it is, you can never make presence into an object, a mind object...Presence is the consciousness itself, before the consciousness becomes a form as a thought, an emotion, a sense perception, it is the stillness underneath all your thinking which has always been there will always be there because it is timeless, underneath all the thinking there is a vast realm of consciousness that you touch when the mind subsides for a moment, there is a space between two thoughts, in which you are conscious, but not thinking.

You could say that intuition is a kind of knowing, but you don’t know how you got there. You know something, but you don’t know by what path you’ve arrived at what you know. It’s a sudden arising of knowledge or knowing something, but “I don’t know how I know this”. What is at work here is non-conceptual intelligence, when intuition arises. Intuition is not arrived at by thinking, not by logic. It’s arrived at in a way that we cannot explain. It is closely related to creativity and inspiration. Inspiration also comes from that place. It is given to you. It is given to all great artists, musicians, writers, and even great scientists who made deep discoveries that were revolutionary - like Einstein. Einstein had a 'sense' of his theory of relativity. Before he could fully prove it, he already knew it was true. It was intuition that came to him. Of course, he had done a lot of thinking before that happened.

Conceptual intelligence is the ability to retain information, analyze, compare, and so forth. It’s a tiny fragment of what intelligence is. There is a vastness of non-conceptual intelligence.

To listen to the silence, wherever you are, is an easy and direct way of becoming present. Even if there is noise, there is always some silence underneath and in between the sounds.

See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.