At the beginning of every winter people are careful to install storm windows. These extra panes of glass protect their houses against the bitter winds. We do something very similar to protect our minds through the practice of meditation.
Whenever you are angry or afraid, nervous or worried or resentful, repeat the mantram until the agitation subsides. The mantram works to steady the mind, and all these emotions are power running against you, which the mantram can harness and put to work for you.
The capacity to be patient, to bear with others through thick and thin, is within the reach of anyone.
International war is the sum total of millions of individual wars, raging in the minds of the people, between what is selfish and what is selfless. To the extent that you and I develop selflessness in our own hearts, to that extent we contribute to peace in our family, community, country, and world.
When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day’s battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.
We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.
When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.
Don’t think the purpose of meditation is to go deep into consciousness, wrap a blanket around yourself, and say, ‘How cozy! I’m going to curl up in here by myself; let the world burn.’ Not at all. We go deep into meditation so that we can reach out further and further to the world outside.
It is not action or effort that we must surrender; it is self-will, and this is terribly difficult. You must do your best constantly, yet never allow yourself to become involved in whether things work out the way you want.
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm – which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.
Instead of looking at difficulties as deprivations, we can learn to recognize them as opportunities for deepening and widening our love.
Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery; we are not our minds either.
We become in part what our senses take in.
Everything beautiful has to be worked for.
When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.
Today, everything I do from morning meditation on – eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation – is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.
The things we think about, brood on, dwell on, and exult over influence our life in a thousand ways. When we can actually choose the direction of our thoughts instead of just letting them run along the grooves of conditioned thinking, we become the masters of our own lives.
Every angry thought makes it a little easier to get angry the next time, and a little more likely.
Mastery does not come from dabbling. We have to be prepared to pay the price. We need to have the sustained enthusiasm that motivates us to give our best.
The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought.