When you are comparing, you are really not looking at the sunset which is there, but you are looking at it in order to compare it with something else. So comparison prevents you from looking fully.
To be aware of inattention is to be attentive. Complete attention is love. It alone can see, and the seeing is the doing.
If one gets used to disturbance it means that one’s mind has become dull, just as one can get so used to beauty around one that one no longer notices it.
To die is to love. The beauty of love is not in past remembrances or in the images of tomorrow. Love has no past and no future; what has, is memory, which is not love. Love with its passion is just beyond the range of society, which is you. Die, and it is there.
The respectable, like the despised, are always at the mercy of circumstances; the influences of environment and the weight of tradition are vastly important to them, for these hide their inward poverty.
If you would discover the supreme happiness of truth, you must break away from all ceremonies and ideological patterns.
Creativeness is not merely a matter of painting pictures or writing poems, which is good to do, but which is very little in itself. What is important is to be wholly discontented, for such total discontent is the beginning of the initiative which becomes creative as it matures; and that is the only way to find out what is truth, what is God, because the creative state is God.
If you do not change now your future will be the same. This is logical. This is sane.
One society will condemn those who believe in God, and another society will condemn those who do not. They are both the same.
It is so much easier to throw oneself into social and political activity than to understand life as a whole; to be associated with any organized thought, with political or religious activity, offers a respectable escape from the pettiness and drudgery of everyday life. With.
So if we completely reject, not intellectually but actually, all so-called spiritual authority, all ceremonies, rituals and dogmas, it means that we stand alone and are already in conflict with society; we cease to be respectable human beings. A respectable human being cannot possibly come near to that infinite, immeasurable, reality.
Reward in any form is extremely gratifying, especially a so-called spiritual reward when one is somewhat indifferent to the honors of the world. Or when one is not very successful in this world, it is very gratifying to belong to a group especially chosen by someone who is supposed to be a highly advanced spiritual being, for then one is part of a team working for a great idea, and naturally one must be rewarded for one’s obedience and for the sacrifices one has made for the cause. If.
To see that one must begin with oneself is to realize an enormous truth; but most of us overlook it; we easily brush it aside because we are concerned with the collective, with changing the social order, with trying to bring about peace and harmony in the world.
Beauty lies in the total abandonment of the observer and the observed and there can be self-abandonment only when there is total austerity – not the austerity of the priest with its harshness, its sanctions, rules and obedience – not austerity in clothes, ideas, food and behaviour – but the austerity of being totally simple which is complete humility. Then there is no achieving, no ladder to climb; there is only the first step and the first step is the everlasting step.
Observe your own emotional states and you will see that the moments of great joy, great ecstasy, are unpremeditated; they happen, mysteriously, darkly, unknowingly.
Without first knowing yourself, how can you know what is true? Illusion is inevitable without self knowledge. It is childish to be told and to accept that you are this or that. Beware.
So what one has to do is to find out if one is dealing with the fundamental, or merely with the superficial. And to me the superficial will exist so long as you are merely concerned with the alteration of environment so as to alleviate conflict. That is, you still want to cling to the “I” consciousness as “mine,” but yet desire to alter the circumstances so that they will not create conflict in that “I.
Beware of the man who offers you a reward in this world or in the next.
So do not misunderstand the word passion. It is not an ugly word; it is not a thing you can buy in the market or talk about romantically. It has nothing whatever to do with emotion, feeling. It is not a respectable thing; it is a flame that destroys anything that is false. And we are always so afraid to allow that flame to devour the things that we hold dear, the things that we call important.
But, you see, happiness does not come so easily, because happiness is in none of these things. You may have pleasure, you may find a new satisfaction, but sooner or later it becomes wearisome. Because there is no lasting happiness in the things we know. The kiss is followed by the tear, laughter by misery and desolation. Everything withers, decays. So, while you are young you must begin to find out what is this strange thing called happiness. That is an essential part of education.