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“Isn’t the pleasure I receive in giving, isn’t that eternal life right here and now?”
I’m trying to get at a picture of an action where there is not self,
I didn’t say that there never is any act where there is not self. Maybe there is.
martyrs, they are brainwashed!
the process that we use for making, for example, a St. Francis Xavier could be exactly the same process used for producing terrorists.
ordinarily everything we do is in our self-interest.
When you’re doing something for the love of anybody, it is in your self-interest.
there are some people who do things so that they won’t have to have a bad feeling. And they call that charity. They act out of guilt.
You’re a healthy individual because you’re self-interested.
the third type, which is the worst: when you do something good so that you won’t get a bad feeling. It doesn’t give you a good feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it.
I choose the lesser of the two evils
You don’t have the guts to say you want to be left alone.
We love to hurt people,
we don’t want to do the hurting ourselves because we’ll get hurt!
we’re surrounded with joy, with happiness, with love. Most people have no idea of this whatsoever.
Are you going to cry because of what you did in your hypnotized state?
Put on a new mind.
the first thing you need to do is wake up, to face the fact that you don’t like being woken up.
Second, understand. Understand that maybe you’ve got the wrong ideas and it is these ideas that are influencing your life and making it the mess that it is and keeping you asleep.
Terrorists or saints (so called) take on an idea, swallow it whole, and are ready to die for it.
not easy to listen, especially when you get emotional about an idea.
The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see.
What you really fear is the loss of the known. That’s what you fear.
you’re no better than anybody else in this world?
How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for nonbeing.
there’s nothing to be very proud of after all.
Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.
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?
watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else.
if you desire to change what is into what you think should be, you no longer understand.
it’s precisely the ones who don’t know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.
One sign that you’re awakened is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life.
perhaps this thing you call “I” is simply a conglomeration of your past experiences, of your conditioning and programming.
the “I” can observe “me.”
It would seem that one needs a certain amount of intelligence to be able to do this.
we begin first with things, with an awareness of things; then we move on to an awareness of thoughts (that’s the “me”); and finally we get to awareness of the thinker. Things, thoughts, thinker.
I am not my thoughts.
am I my body? Evidently not!
“I” is something other
“Are you planning to vote Republican?” The friend says, “No, I’m planning to vote Democratic. My father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat, and my great-grandfather was a Democrat.” The man says, “That is crazy logic. I mean, if your father was a horse thief, and your grandfather was a horse thief, and your great-grandfather was a horse thief, what would you be?” “Ah,” the friend answered, “then I’d be a Republican.”
Does the observer ever change?
when you identify “I” with “me,” suffering begins.
When “I” does not identify with money, or name, or nationality, or persons, or friends, or any quality, the “I” is never threatened.
Think of anything that caused or is ca...
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pick up the desire under that...
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there’s an identification there.
All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.
Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion.
The one who has to change is you.
the “I” is never threatened; it’s only the “me” that is threatened.
