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Whenever you find a man who says he doesn’t believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.
When the mind is silent, when it is no longer projecting itself into the future, wishing for something; when the mind is really quiet, profoundly peaceful, the unknown comes into being. You don’t have to search for it. You cannot invite it. That which you can invite is only that which you know. You cannot invite an unknown guest. You can only invite one you know. But you do not know the unknown, God, reality, or what you will. It must come. It can come only when the field is right, when the soil is tilled, but if you till in order for it to come, then you will not have it.
The understanding of oneself is not a result, a culmination; it is seeing oneself from moment to moment in the mirror of relationship — one’s relationship to property, to things, to people and to ideas.
What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
Come, look at this world, glittering like a royal chariot; the foolish are immersed in it, but the wise do not touch it.
Life on earth is nothing but a field for working on oneself, so that one can return from whence one came.
Nothing is more useful or more interesting than to pull yourself up suddenly and notice where you are inside and where you are going. If you do this, you will begin to see what sort of psychology you have and what tendencies belong to it and what it keeps on connecting you with.
You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
The imagination is alternately a cheat and a dupe; nay, more, it is the most subtle of cheats, for it cheats itself, and becomes the dupe of its own delusions. It conjures up “airy nothings,” gives to them a “local habitation and a name,” and then bows to their control as implicitly as if they were realities.
It is not poverty so much as pretense, that harasses a ruined man. The struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse — the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.
The mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which can be more or less big, without ever being able to cast a glance on what is beyond it. If a captive mind ignores its own captivity, it lives in error. If it recognizes it, even if for a tenth of a second, and if it is pressed to forget it in order to avoid suffering, it lives a lie.
War is merely an outward expression of our inward state, an enlargement of our daily action. It is more spectacular, more bloody, more destructive, but it is the collective result of our individual activities.
Liberation does not concern the person, for liberation is freedom from the person.
Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.
Stand, stand!… Nothing routs us but
The villainy of our fears.
Let each man think himself an act of God.
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God.
We seek what one might call a relative omnipotence: the power to have everything we want, to enjoy everything we desire, to demand that all our wishes be satisfied and that our will should never be frustrated or opposed. It is the need to have everyone else bow to our judgment and accept our declarations as law. It is the insatiable thirst for recognition of the excellence which we so desperately need to find in ourselves to avoid despair. This claim to omnipotence, our deepest secret and our inmost shame, is in fact the source of all our sorrows, all our unhappiness, all our dissatisfactions, all our mistakes and deceptions.
If you persist in trying
To attain what is never attained
If you persist in making effort
To obtain what effort cannot get;
If you persist in reasoning
About what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed
By the very thing you seek.
To know when to stop
To know when you can get no further
By your own action,
This is the right beginning!
O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this for a truth: the thing thou seekest is already here, “here or nowhere,” couldst thou only see.
To will what God wills is the only science that gives us rest.