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Second, contemplate the walls, spend hours just observing your ideas, your habits, your attachments and your fears without any judgment and condemnation. Look at them and they will crumble.
The second quality is its effortlessness. Effort can change behavior, it cannot change you. Think of this: Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite; it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep; it can make you reveal a secret to another but it cannot produce trust; it can force you to
effort can perform acts of service, it is powerless to produce love or holiness. All
SERPENTS AND DOVES
Our challenge is to recapture the simplicity and wisdom of the dove without losing the cunningness of the serpentine brain. How can you achieve this? Through an
So any change you achieve is always accompanied by inner conflict. And you suffer when you see others achieve what you have not and become what you are not.
And as soon as you have a formula, you have reality filtered through the mind of someone else. If
You must drop your false belief that people can sin in awareness. No one can sin in the light of awareness. Sin occurs, not, as we mistakenly think, in malice, but in ignorance.
The blocks to sensitivity are two; Belief and Attachment. Belief—as soon as you have a belief you have come to a conclusion about a person or situation or thing. You have now become fixed and have dropped your sensitivity. You are prejudiced and will see the person from the eye of that prejudice. In other
If you ever allow yourself to see it will be the death of you. And that is why love is so terrifying, for to love is to see and to see is to die.
It means to see a person, a thing, a situation, as it really is and not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves. You cannot love what you do not even see.
Seeing is the most arduous thing a human being can undertake.
You have lost your capacity to see them clearly as they are and to respond to them accurately because mostly your perception of them is clouded by your need to get your drug.
The consequence of all this is terrifying and inescapable: You have become incapable of loving anyone or anything.
It is like inviting yourself to die.
Indeed it is. 3 years of inviting myself to die and still somehow I manage to go back...hope it works this time.
for familiarity breeds staleness, blindness and boredom.
may not be a defect at all but really something that your upbringing and conditioning have led you to dislike.
What is love? It is a sensitivity to every portion of reality within you and without, together with a wholehearted response to that reality. Sometimes you will embrace that reality, sometimes you will attack it, sometimes you will ignore it and at others you will give it your fullest attention,
but always you will respond not from need but from sensitivity.
Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your teacher, because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not know. And they offered you an invitation and a challenge to self-understanding, self-discovery, and therefore to growth and life and freedom.
The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another. None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure that initially grows in intensity, then turns into pain if you lose them and into boredom if you keep them.
burn the boat to ashes.
Our discontent is based upon our desire for “the more.”
Its source is greed and ambition and its fruit is restlessness and frustration.
this programming of yours was picked up from insecure people who, when you were very young and impressionable, taught you by their behavior and their panic reactions that every time the outside world did not conform to a certain pattern, you must create an emotional turmoil within yourself called insecurity.
And that the present always gives me the resources and the energy I need to deal with them.”
The present moment, no matter how painful, is never unbearable.
What is unbearable is what you think is going to happen in five hours or in five days; and those words you keep saying in your head, words like, “This is terrible, this is unbearable, how long is this going to last,” and so on.
True tolerance only arises from a keen awareness of the abysmal ignorance of everyone as far as truth is concerned. For truth is essentially mystery. The mind can sense but cannot grasp it, much less formulate it. Our beliefs can point to it but cannot put it into words.
Look into yourself and examine your reactions to persons and situations, and you will be appalled to discover the prejudiced thinking behind your reactions. It is almost never the concrete reality of this person or thing that you are responding to.
Take them one at a time, each person and thing and situation and search for your bias separating the reality here before you from your programmed perceptions and your projections.
Effort does not lead to growth; effort, whatever the form it may take, whether it be willpower or habit or a technique or a spiritual exercise, does not lead to change. At best it leads to repression and a covering over of the root disease.
A Grace called Awareness, a grace called Looking, Observing, Understanding.
