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he was telling me and these people that in his eyes I was a “golden eagle,” unaware of the heights to which I could soar.
the message of “awareness,” seeing the light we are to ourselves and to others, recognizing we are better than we know.
Let the words slip into your soul and listen, as Tony would suggest, with your heart.
ON WAKING UP Spirituality means waking up.
As the Arabs say, “The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.”
If you are damaged, you did it; and if you are helped, you did it. You really did!
She thought she was being supported when she wasn’t. The point is that most of what we feel and think we conjure up for ourselves in our heads, including this business of being helped by people.
The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it.
“The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness.”
“Would you want me to love you at the cost of my happiness?”
“You are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.” It’s so important to understand that. We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions.
Look at the heartache everywhere, look at the loneliness, look at the fear, the confusion, the conflict in the hearts of people, inner conflict, outer conflict.
What’s the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?
We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything.
Bertrand Russell who said, “Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.”
Don’t trust them. Don’t trust your best friends.
Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce.
When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. As long as you’re fighting it, you are giving it power.
The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands.
hypnotized into thinking that you won’t be happy without this, that, or the other thing, you’re stuck.
That’s what learning is all about where spirituality is concerned: unlearning, unlearning almost everything you’ve been taught. A willingness to unlearn, to listen.
An openness to the truth, no matter what the consequences, no matter where it leads you and when you don’t even know where it’s going to lead you.
Your beliefs give you a lot of security, but faith is insecurity. You don’t know. You’re ready to follow and you’re open, you’re wide open!
There are two types of selfishness. The first type is the one where I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself. That’s what we generally call self-centeredness.
second is when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. That would be a more refined kind of selfishness.
your need to be needed—and you also know you need to be needed in a way that makes you feel like you’re contributing to the world
much rather have all of the things which you were hypnotized into believing are so precious to you, so important to you, so important for your life and your survival.
Ideas about love, ideas about freedom, ideas about happiness,
The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see.
you really fear is the loss of the known.
How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for nonbeing.
What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people.
Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone.
When someone tells you, “There is nothing you can do about it,” you say, “There is, I can wake up!” All of a sudden, life is no longer the nightmare that it has seemed. Wake up!
you forget that you have it all right now
Why not concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?
Self-absorption is self-preoccupation, where you’re concerned about yourself, worried about yourself.
self-observation. What’s that? It means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else.
you would be the sky, observing the clouds. You are a passive, detached observer.
The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand.
They need to be understood. If you understood them, they’d change.
No judgment, no commentary, no attitude: one simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is.
Human means that you have to be a little monkey, so everybody can twist your tail, and you do whatever you ought to be doing.
Cut out all the O.K. stuff and the not-O.K. stuff; cut out all the judgments and simply observe, watch. You’ll make great discoveries. These discoveries will change you. You won’t have to make the slightest effort, believe me.
FINDING YOURSELF
self-observation means watching—observing whatever is going on in you and around you as if it were happening to someone else.
Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency.
I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you.
a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody,
Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
