It is an illusion that some savior or guru or teacher can awaken you. Not even the greatest guru in the world can take a single step for you. You must take each step yourself. St. Augustine said it so marvelously: “Jesus Christ himself could do nothing for many of his hearers.” It is you who must do it. No one else can help you. It is you who have to understand. No one else…
When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live. It’s all over the gospel pages. And one attains this by understanding. Understand. Understand another illusion, too, that happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills. That’s another illusion, that a thrill comes from living a desire fulfilled. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered sufficiently, then…
Everyone asks me about what will happen when they finally arrive. Get started and you will know; it cannot be described. It is said widely in the East, “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.” It cannot be said; only the opposite can be said. It’s as if you had never tasted a mango and you ask me, “What does it taste like?” I’d say to you, “Sweet,” but in…
If you think that compassion implies softness, there’s no way I can describe compassion to you, absolutely no way, because compassion can be very hard. Compassion can be very rude, compassion can jolt you, compassion can roll up its sleeves and operate on you. Compassion is all kinds of things. Compassion can be very soft, but there’s no way of knowing that. It’s only when you become love—in other words, when you have dropped your…
Some say that there are only two things in the world: love and fear are the only two things. There’s only one evil in the world, fear. There’s only one good in the world, love. It’s sometimes called by other names. It’s sometimes called happiness or freedom or peace or joy or God or whatever. But the label doesn’t really matter. And there’s not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to…
The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: “Who am I?” Or rather: “What is ‘I’?” What is this thing I call “I”? What is this thing I call self? You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this? You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know who you are? My, you…
This website is intended for busy people, active people, and energetic people. I’m not inculcating any mystical withdrawal from life; far from it. Christianity teaches that God and spirituality is to be found in life, not by withdrawing from it. There are two simple attitudes that help maintain spiritual awareness in everyday life when some difficulty arises, as it always does. The first attitude I call acceptance. It’s contained in a prayer most of us…
Compare the serene and simple splendor of a rose in bloom with the tensions and restlessness of your life. The rose has a gift that we tend to lack: It is perfectly content to be itself. It has not been programmed from birth, as you have been, to be dissatisfied with itself, so it has not the slightest urge to be anything other than it is. That is why it possesses the artless grace and…
Each time you are anxious and afraid, it is because you may lose or fail to get the object of your attachment, isn’t it? And each time you feel jealous, isn’t it because someone may make off with what you are attached to? And almost all your anger comes from someone standing in the way of your attachment, doesn’t it? And see how paranoid you become when your attachment is threatened – you cannot think…
Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed by society to be unhappy and so, no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail? Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they were. If you wish to be happy the first thing you need is not effort or…
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