French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

The garden, by design, is concerned with both the interior and the land beyond the garden.

You can't make positive choices for the rest of your life without an environment that makes those choices easy, natural, and enjoyable.

There is no fixed physical reality, no single perception of the world, just numerous ways of interpreting world views as dictated by one's nervous system and the specific environment of our planetary existence.

For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.

Success comes when people act together; failure tends to happen alone.

The fear of death comes from limited awareness.

Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.

Karma is experience, and experience creates memory, and memory creates imagination and desire, and desire creates karma again. If I buy a cup of coffee, that's karma. I now have that memory that might give me the potential desire for having cappuccino, and I walk into Starbucks, and there's karma all over again.

Karma, memory, and desire are just the software of the soul. It's conditioning that the soul undergoes in order to create experience. And it's a cycle. In most people, the cycle is a conditioned response. They do the same things over and over again.

The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor's badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it; you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully.

Happiness is a continuation of happenings which are not resisted.

Research has shown that the best way to be happy is to make each day happy.

What gets in our way is history and culture and religion and economic conditions. It is part of the hypnosis of our social conditioning.

You know, religion itself, Eastern and Western, is divisive and quarrelsome anyway.

There are receptors to these molecules in your immune system, in your gut and in your heart. So when you say, 'I have a gut feeling' or 'my heart is sad' or 'I am bursting with joy,' you're not speaking metaphorically. You're speaking literally.

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

Every spiritual tradition has this idea of death and resurrection. It's not unique to Christianity.

I went to medical school because I wanted to ask the big questions. Do we have a soul? Does God exist? What happens after death?

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking.

As long as you think of your real self as the person you are, then of course you're going to be fearful of death. But what is a person? A person is a pattern of behavior, of a larger awareness. You know, the two-year-old dies before the three-year-old shows up, the three-year-old dies before the teenager shows up.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

Traditional science assumes, for the most part, that an objective observer independent reality exists; the universe, stars, galaxies, sun, moon and earth would still be there if no one was looking.

Science stands for rational thought, faith for superstition and unreason.

I feel genius in great works of art. I have seen medical cures that science can't explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people.

In every conversation I've had - with housewives in Mumbai, with middle-class people, upper-class, in the slums - everyone says there is an underlying consciousness of karma. That people believe in karma - that what you're putting out is going to come back. If I do something to you, the energy of it is going to come back to me in the future.

A child in India grows up with the idea that you have to make choices that will create a better future. In fact, your whole life is a continuum of choices, so the more conscious you are, the greater your life will be.

New Age values are conscious evolution, a non-sectarian society, a non-military culture, global sharing, healing the environment, sustainable economies, self-determination, social justice, economic empowerment of the poor, love, compassion in action, going beyond religious fundamentalism, going beyond nationalism-extreme nationalism, culture.

Your conscious brain cannot multitask. If I'm speaking to you and checking my I-Phone at the same time, I'm doing neither. This is why our society is frazzled; this misconception that we can consciously do more than one thing at a time effectively.

Once the fabric of a just society is undone, it takes generations to weave it back together.

But the real secret to lifelong good health is actually the opposite: Let your body take care of you.

In societies where mature workers are respected and where their wisdom is respected, everybody benefits. Workers are more engaged and productive. Their health is better. They live longer.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

Self-awareness is not just relaxation and not just meditation. It must combine relaxation with activity and dynamism. Technology can aid that.

I've always felt that technology can be used to our benefit and should be used to our benefit.

When I looked at the addictive qualities of video games and how they captivate people's attention, I decided to try the same technology for enhancing well-being.

To think is to practice brain chemistry.

Life gives you plenty of time to do whatever you want to do if you stay in the present moment.

I think we need the feminine qualities of leadership, which include attention to aesthetics and the environment, nurturing, affection, intuition and the qualities that make people feel safe and cared for.

There are very few good examples of effective, nurturing leadership that unlocks people's potential or even enthusiasm.

In my definition of consciousness, consciousness is the same thing as life. What wisdom traditions also call spirit.

We can actually accelerate the process through meditation, through the ability to find stillness through loving actions, through compassion and sharing, through understanding the nature of the creative process in the universe and having a sense of connection to it. So, that's conscious evolution.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

Victims always feel alone and helpless.

People need to know that they have all the tools within themselves. Self-awareness, which means awareness of their body, awareness of their mental space, awareness of their relationships - not only with each other, but with life and the ecosystem.

Karma is only in space time and causality. Your real self resides non-locally.

Consciousness, rather than being an epiphenomenon of matter, is actually the source of matter. It differentiates into space time, energy, information, and matter. Even though this view is an ancient view, an ancient world view, it is now finding some resonance amongst a few scientists.

I have tremendous faith in President Obama's skills. He's a long-term visionary.

We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.