The following six Key Lessons contain special understanding about the nature of invisible pressure-filled states that cause run human beings to run themselves ragged. The clearer we can see the reasons for why our lives are always in such a rush, the sooner we arrive at the true solutions that allow us to slow down, take command, and realize the relaxed pace of Real Life. Study each lesson separately for the secret it tells; put all the lessons together and let them tell you the true story of how you can realize a New Life that is always at peace within itself.

1. An unseen force that makes “mountains out of molehills” is the presence of that pressure within us that causes us to rush through life. There is a secret and inverse proportion between this pressing need we have for speed, and how important we must be if we’re always anxious to get somewhere else in a hurry.

2. Rushing from place to place is a poor man’s riches; for in his ceaseless hurry to reach the pleasure or power he imagines, he is able to temporarily escape the poverty of himself that he would rather not know.

3. Here is a truth unseen by the masses, but evident to those weary of going nowhere fast: he who rushes through life always finishes last! Here’s why this is true: we race as we do to escape our sense of unhappiness with where we are, endlessly running towards what we imagine will free us from our own dissatisfied feelings; but such races are always lost before they begin, because who do you know that can outrun himself?

4. Rushing through life lends the one who habitually hurries the feeling of being “important”; but loans such as these come at the high cost of always having to justify one’s unkindness — as when one has to convince himself that his impatience with others is a necessary evil along the way that “greater good” towards which he thinks he runs.

5. Patience is a great virtue that is painfully learned by becoming conscious of what our impatience does to others.

6. One is well on his or her way to the Awakened Life when just to be alive is their source of peace and contentment.