Understanding is now or never; it is a destructive flash, not a tame affair; it is this shattering that one is afraid of and so one avoids it, knowingly or unknowingly. Understanding may alter the course of one’s life, the way of thought and action; it may be pleasant or not but understanding is a danger to all relationship. But without understanding, sorrow will continue.
I must love the very thing I am studying. If you want to understand a child, you must love and not condemn him. You must play with him, watch his movements, his idiosyncrasies, his ways of behaviour; but if you merely condemn, resist or blame him, there is no comprehension of the child.
Love must exist with freedom. Not the freedom to do what I like – that is nonsense; freedom of choice, and so on, has no value in what we are talking about – but there must be total freedom to love.
But to run away from fear is only to increase it. One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are.
The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.
That is what we do. We carry our burdens all the time; we never die to them, we never leave them behind.
Living in such a corrupt, stupid society as we do, with the competitive education we receive which engenders fear, we are all burdened with fears of some king, and fear is a dreadful thing which warps, twists, and dulls our days.
Sir, love is not directed to something. The sunshine is not directed to you and me; it is there.
Because the brain functions perfectly only in order, not in disorder. It functions most efficiently when there is complete order, whether that order is neurotic or rational; because in neurosis, in imbalance, there is order, and the brain accepts that order.
Wisdom is greater than saintliness, for wisdom comes with the ending of sorrow. And the understanding of sorrow is to understand oneself. Then in the understanding of oneself so completely, there is quietness, there is beauty.
You are educated to fit into society; but that is not education, it is merely a process which conditions you to conform to a pattern.
The man who is trying to become something is ugly, insensitive; he is a crude person.
When there is love, self is not.
All of life is the study of attention; where your attention goes, your life follows.
Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted, and aggressive. It dare not move away from its own patterns of thinking, and this breeds hypocrisy. Until we are free from fear, we may climb the highest mountain, invent every kind of God, but we will remain in darkness.
Psychologically, suffering comes through attachment – to an idea, to ideals, to opinions, to beliefs, to persons, to concepts. Please observe it in yourself. The world is the mirror in which you are looking that shows the operations of your own mind. So look there.
Sorrow may be controlled, disciplined, subjugated, rationalized, super-refined, but the potential quality of sorrow is still there; and to be free from sorrow, there must be freedom from this potentiality, from this seed of the ‘I’, the self, from the whole process of becoming.
We can all learn how to make a living: the art of living, however, we must each learn on our own.
When you compare yourself with another, ideologically, psychologically, or even physically, there is the striving to become that; and there is the fear that you may not. It is the desire to fulfil and you may not be able to fulfil. Where there is comparison there must be fear.
Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.