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You watch your own mind and you will see that the moment the mind ceases to think in terms of becoming something, there is a cessation of action which is not stagnation; it is a state of total attention, which is goodness.
Opposites cannot be fused and they are to be transcended through the dissolution of craving.
Man seems to unite more in hate than in good. A wise man realizes the cause of evil and good, and through understanding frees thought-feeling from it.
We have a magnificent structure of ideas to justify evil and surely that is unprecedented. Evil is evil; it cannot bring about good. War is not a means to peace.
Every opposite contains the seed of its own opposite, does it not?
When the mind wants not to want, the root of want, of desire, is still there.
So goodness is not the opposite of evil; it is a totally different state. And what is that state?
So what do we mean by goodness? Surely, there is goodness only when there is total attention. Attention has no motive.
So, what is important is to find out how the mind is occupied. If it is occupied at all, it is always occupied with the past because all our consciousness is the past.
And a mind that is dependent can never be free.
You need to be free, because you will see that a mind that is free has the essence of humility. Such a mind, which is free and therefore has humility, can learn—not a mind that resists.
The ultimate gratifying possession is the word God, or its substitute, the State.
Love alone shares, it alone can commune; but renunciation and self-sacrifice are the ways of isolation and illusion.
The mind invents detachment as a reaction to the pain of attachment. When you react to attachment by becoming “detached,” you are attached to something else. So
The problem now arises of the observer and the observed. The observer says, “I am empty; I don’t like it,” and runs away from it. The observer says, “I am different from the emptiness.” But the observer is the emptiness; it is not emptiness seen by an observer. The observer is the observed. There is a tremendous revolution in thinking, in feeling, when that takes place.
think it is really important to understand this, for I think this is where most of us go astray. We do not want to know what we actually are at a given moment in relationship.
Conflict is between this craving for comfort and the factual, between illusion and actuality.
If you recognize the illusion then you can, by putting it aside, give your attention to the understanding of relationship.
Relationship is a process of self-revelation, of self-knowledge. This self-revelation is painful, demanding constant adjustment, pliability of thought-emotion. It is a painful struggle, with periods of enlightened peace …
That is a fact. How can two images which are the result of thought, of pleasure and so on, have any affection or love?
To understand relationship, there must be a passive awareness, which does not destroy relationship. On the contrary, it makes relationship much more vital, much more significant.
Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship;
The peculiar tendencies that arise with advancing age must be understood and corrected while we are still capable of detached and tolerant self-observation and study; our fears must be observed and understood now.
So what is important is not “how to be free of fear?” If you seek a way, a method, a system to be rid of fear, you will be everlastingly caught in fear.
In understanding the cause of fear, there is its cessation, not the becoming courageous, for in all becoming there is the seed of fear. Dependence on things, on people, or on ideas breeds fear; dependence arises from ignorance, from the lack of self-knowledge, from inward poverty; fear causes uncertainty of mind-heart, preventing communication and understanding.
He cannot run away from himself; all that he can do is to understand himself. He is his loneliness, his emptiness; and as long as he regards it as something separate from himself, he will be in illusion and endless conflict.
Fear exists only in relationship to an idea, and idea is the response of memory as thought.
Thought is the result of experience; and though it can ponder over emptiness, have sensations with regard to it, it cannot know emptiness directly.
we want it repeated—and I think that is where pleasure begins to darken the mind and create values which are false, not actual.
But I can look at it and have a desire, and that’s the end of it, without interference of thought.
Life is living, abundance, fullness, abandonment, not a sense of the “I” having significance.
That is mere intellection. If you experiment with dying to little things—that is good enough. Just to die to little pleasures—with ease, with comfort, with a smile—is enough, for then you will see that your mind is capable of dying to many things, dying to all memories.
Is it not essentially because we always think from a particular point of view, from a fixed point of view?
When do you think about the person whom you love? You think about her when she is gone, when she is away, when she has left you…. So, you miss the person whom you say you love only when you are disturbed, when you are in suffering; and as long as you possess that person, you do not have to think about that person, because in possession there is no disturbance….
The things of the mind are jealousy, envy, ambition, the desire to be somebody, to achieve success.
When there is love, there is no duty. When you love your wife, you share everything with her—your property, your trouble, your anxiety, your joy. You do not dominate. You are not the man and she the woman to be used and thrown aside, a sort of breeding machine to carry on your name.
Love does not fuse, adjust—it is neither personal nor impersonal, it is a state of being.
It is only when the mind is quiet that it shall know love, and that state of quietness is not a thing to be cultivated.
Truth cannot be bought, there is no means to truth; if there is a means, the end would not be truth, because means and end are one, they are not separate.
But I am using the word passion in the sense of a state of mind, a state of being, a state of your inward core, if there is such a thing, that feels very strongly, that is highly sensitive—sensitive alike to dirt, to squalor, to poverty, and to enormous riches and corruption, to the beauty of a tree, of a bird, to the flow of water, and to a pond that has the evening sky reflected upon it.
mind that is passionate is inquiring, searching, looking, asking, demanding, not merely trying to find for its discontent some object in which it can fulfill itself and go to sleep. A passionate mind is groping, seeking, breaking through, not accepting any tradition; it is not a decided mind, not a mind that has arrived, but it is a young mind that is ever arriving.
Training the intellect does not result in intelligence. Rather, intelligence comes into being when one acts in perfect harmony, both intellectually and emotionally.
There is a vast distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is merely thought functioning independently of emotion.
but one does not have intelligence, because in intelligence there is the inherent capacity to feel as well as to reason;
Until you really approach all of life with your intelligence, instead of merely with your intellect, no system in the world will save man from the ceaseless toil for bread.
love is not memory. That is very difficult for us to understand because for most of us, love is memory.
I mean by “feeling” the appreciation of the curve of a branch, the squalor, the dirt on the road, to be sensitive to the sorrow of another, to be in a state of ecstasy when we see a sunset.
Love is a flame without smoke, ever fresh, creative, joyous.
Can the mind see the barrier of the word, understand the significance of the word in a flash and be in that state when the mind is no longer caught in time? You must have experienced this; only it is a very rare thing for most of us.
Just see the problem first, don’t ask what is the answer, the solution.
