To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.
Experience life in all possible ways – good, bad, bitter-sweet, dark, light, summer, winter. Experience all the dualities. Don’t be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
One just needs a little alertness to see and find out: Life is really a great cosmic laughter.
I live my life based on 2 principles. One, I live as if today was my last day on earth. Two, I live today as if I am going to live forever.
Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.
In the space of no-mind, truth descends like light.
Love is not a relationship, love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not “in love”, one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love – but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.
Love is the goal, life is the journey.
No thought, no mind, no choice – just being silent, rooted in yourself.
Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.
Mind has a temptation to divide. Once you divide, mind is at ease. If you don’t divide, if you say, “I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to judge,” mind feels as if it on deathbed.
Watch. Whenever the mind says something, see that it is again putting you into a routine. Try to do something new and the mind will have less of a grip on you.
The only thing that has to be learned is watchfulness. Watch! Watch every act that you do. Watch every thought that passes in your mind. Watch every desire that takes possession of you. Watch even small gestures – walking, talking, eating, taking a bath. Go on watching everything. Let everything become an opportunity to watch.
If you eat watchfully, food will become more tasty. Even ordinary food tastes good if you are watchful; and if you are not watchful, you can eat the most tasty food but there will be no taste in it because there is nobody to watch. You simply go on stuffing yourself. Eat slowly, watchfully; each bite has to be chewed, tasted.
The ego is very cunning in that way: it goes on finding supports, props, new pastures to feed itself on. If you fail, you blame circumstances. If you succeed, it is you who have succeeded. If you fail it is fate, kismet; if you fail it is the society, the ugly society. If you fail, it is the cunning people, the cunning competitors. But if you succeed, you succeed.
Reality never comes as a problem; it is only the ideas about reality that create the problem. So the first thing to be understood is that if you can dissolve the psychological pain, no problem is left. Then you start living in the moment.
You come alone, you die alone. Between birth and death, of course you can deceive yourself that someone is with you – your wife, your father, your mother, your husband, your friend – but this is just make-believe. You come alone, you go alone; you are alone between birth and death.
Once you are in a relationship you start taking each other for granted. That’s what destroys all love affairs. The woman thinks she knows the man, the man thinks he knows the woman. Nobody knows either. It is impossible to know the other, the other remains a mystery. And to take the other for granted is insulting, disrespectful.
Though her dad was American, she was as British as binge drinking and sarcasm so drawing attention to herself, even when dying, felt inappropriate.
The visible part of the soul is known as the body, and the invisible part of the body is called the soul. God and the world are not two separate entities; there is absolutely no conflict between God and nature. Nature is the visible, the gross aspect of God, and God is the invisible, the subtle aspect of nature.
Meditation means a state of unconditioned mind. Meditation is the process of undoing the harm that every society goes on doing to every individual – communist or Catholic, Jaina or Jew, it does not matter. I am not talking about any particular conditioning that is wrong; I am saying conditioning AS SUCH is wrong.