Hippie

by Paulo Coelho

Returning to the trails: after Machu Picchu, the next hot spot was Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia. Then Lhasa, in Tibet, where it was difficult to enter because, according to the “Invisible Post,” there was a war between monks and Chinese soldiers.

The women had their pick of men and never gave a thought to marriage, only to having a good time enjoying wild, intense sex. When it came to the important things, and even the most superficial and irrelevant, they had the last word.

The answer was simple: their panic was so great that they were no longer present. The brain blocks out everything, there’s neither terror nor fear, just a strange submission to what’s about to occur.

we don’t choose the things that happen to us, but we can choose how we react to them.

“Your light fills the entire Universe / The lamp of love burns and rescues Understanding.”

Paulo and Karla were merely waiting for the right moment to make their feelings clear. That was the instant when many relationships that could have resulted in great love stories were lost—or because when two souls meet on the face of the earth, they already know where their journeys will lead them and this terrifies them,

A love that owes nothing to anyone, that has no obligations, that finds joy in simple existence and the freedom to express itself.

Those who trust in themselves trust others. Because they know that, when they are betrayed—and everyone is betrayed, that’s part of life—it’s possible to start all over again. Part of the fun in life is exactly this: running risks.

Everyone slept beneath the stars, more times than not jittering with cold but grateful to be able to look to the sky and know that they could speak with the silence, sleep in the company of angels they could almost see, cease to exist for a few moments—even if it were only fractions of a second—as they felt eternity and infinity all around them.

He wasn’t about to live in fear because a group of people who considered themselves the ultimate authority, and, as a result, authorities over others, had tried to ruin a day in his life. It was all right, it was just one day, but one day was the most precious good he had on this earth.

He tried not to think about what he had seen—revisiting the past is no use, it serves only to place figurative shackles on our feet and remove any sign of hope in humanity.

Sufism recognizes a single truth: nothing is divisible, the visible and the invisible are one, each of us is merely an illusion in flesh and bone.

“I want to learn the ways of the Sufi. I need a teacher.” “Then seek the Truth. Seek always to be on its side, even when it brings you pain. There are times when the Truth goes quiet for long stretches, or when it doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. That’s Sufism.

The more we allow the world in, the more we receive—be it love, be it hate.

“Because a life without love isn’t worth living. What is a life without love? It’s a tree that bears no fruit. It’s sleeping without dreaming. At times, it’s even an inability to sleep. It’s living one day after another waiting for the sun to shine into a room that is completely shut up, painted black, where you know where the key is but have no desire to open the door and go out.”