You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple.
Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.
Because everyone is the same distance from the sun. Does it really lessen the distance if you live on top of a skyscraper?
The words of the scholar are to be understood. The words of the master are not to be understood. They are to be listened to as one listens to the wind in the trees and the sound of the river and the song of the bird. They will awaken something within the heart that is beyond all knowledge.
Said the master: “Where does your question come from?”
Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
You’re not living until it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you’re ready to lose your life, you live it.
Said the monk: “All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars – where do they come from?” Said the master: “Where does your question come from?”
A newly married couple said, “What shall we do to make our love endure?” Said the Master, “Love other things together”...
We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever. It’s only a flash and we waste it. We waste it with our anxiety, our worries, our concerns, our burdens.
No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.
Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.
If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.
People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favour progress, provided they can have it without change.
You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.
The world is right because I feel good. p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990.
This truth I firmly hold, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding; my life has been a gift, a blessing to the world.
I leave you free to be yourself: to think your thoughts, indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in ways that you decide are to your liking.
There comes a point in your life when you become stark raving insane, commit suicide or become a mystic.
Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.