If, as human beings, we are to answer the call within us to perfect ourselves and the world around us — if we are ever to realize a direct and personal relationship with success itself -— then we must all take a mandatory step in our own inner-evolution: we must learn to live in (and participate with) the ever-unfolding and ever-new present moment.

Being conscious of ourselves in the present moment is the key to all things good, not just for the better choices we can make for ourselves (because we can see more possibilities) — but because the more awake we are in the now, the less likely we are to allow ourselves to be negatively compromised by our own past. Our relationships grow, because we do; confidence increases, because we make fewer mistakes in our awakened state. Being grounded in the present moment empowers us to stand in a world where the waves of troubled thoughts and feelings can no longer reach us to wash us away.

Following are five great lessons in learning what is needed to let go and live in the now. Like the facets of a precious stone, they must be held up to the light of your wish to understand them before they can show you their secret and self-liberating brilliance. Your task is to bring your intention to be free to the altar of persistent effort. The Truth does the rest. A grand reunion awaits you within your real home in the eternal now.

The answer to what is the best use of one’s life is found only in being present enough to oneself to detect and reject all of those useless thoughts and feelings that undermine our higher possibilities. Only then do we realize that letting go of these limitations is the same as serving our own highest interests, for our greatest potential is to be free.

To remember that the reaction of another is not our responsibility frees us not only from the futile action of trying to repair moments past, but also sets in motion the possibility of freeing that person from his mistaken idea that something outside of him is to be blamed for his unwanted experience of life.

The secret of success is to make impersonal those times and places where we stumble or fall, whereas to take failure personally makes a finite “self” out of what is, in reality, little more than a setback. In truth, there is no such “self” to fail at anything; there is only a certain level of understanding not yet adequate to the task before it. Knowledge of this truth not only permits us to transcend the trials of life we must face, but also empowers us to let go of those painful parts of ourselves that love to judge everything!

Only the person who never gives up in life, who persists with his wish to find and fulfill the promise of himself, makes this extraordinary discovery: those places that he once mistook as being impassible barriers to his happiness become as bridges to the same, but only if he learns to welcome them as part of his journey.

It’s so obvious that billions miss it: wherever we hope to go in life requires of us that we start right from wherever we are; which means that the only way to reach the new and higher ground of ourselves necessitates that we awaken to — and learn to work with — what we are in the moment