It is a sobering thought that the finest act of love you can perform is not an act of service but an act of contemplation, of seeing. When you serve people, you help, support, comfort, and alleviate pain. When you see them in their inner beauty and goodness, you transform and create. Think of some of the people you like and who are drawn to you. Now attempt to look at each of them as…
Love, like sensitivity, either is in all its fullness or it simply is not. You either have it whole or you have it not. So, it is only when attachments disappear that one enters the boundless realm of spiritual freedom called “love.” You can hardly be said to love what you do not even notice. And, if you notice only a few beings to the exclusion of others, that is not love at all. For…
What is love? God’s kingdom is love. It is a sensitivity to every portion of reality within you and without along with a wholehearted response to that reality. It means to be sensitive to life, to things, to persons; it means to feel for everything and everyone to the exclusion of nothing and no one. Sometimes you will embrace that reality, sometimes you will attack it, sometimes you will ignore it, and other times, you…
Away to Approach Thanksgiving Day Set out in search of the source of happiness. Look closely at the life of a happy person who is poor, then talk with him, attempting to discover what makes this person happy. Think of a joyful person in poor health, in physical pain, and talk to them, searching for what it is that makes them joyful. Do the same with a happy person who has lost his reputation. Then…
Stop for a moment and contemplate in horror the endless list of attachments that you have become a prisoner to. Think of concrete things and persons, not abstractions. Once your attachment had you in its grip, you began to strive with every waking minute of your life to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of your attachment. This is an exhausting task. It leaves you little energy…
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 had been. If you wish to be happy, the first thing you need isn’t effort or…
Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing—but absolutely nothing of the world—can make you happy. The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend or lover to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another. None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure, that initially grows in intensity…
Sooner or later, there arises in every human heart the desire for holiness, spirituality, God—call it what you will. One hears mystics speak of a divinity all around us that is within our grasp, that would make our lives meaningful and beautiful and rich, if we could only discover it. But look at the heartache everywhere, look at the loneliness, look at the fear, the confusion, the conflict in the hearts of people. Inner conflict….
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…
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