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We get an impression and we hold on to that impression, and we keep looking at a person through that impression.
losing oneself in order to find oneself. One finds it in most religious literature
Happiness releases you from self.
To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were.
Personal worth doesn’t mean self-worth.
Where do you get self-worth from?
Pleasant experiences make life delightful.
Painful experiences lead to growth.
where you need to grow and be transformed and change.
The disappointment you experience when things don’t turn out as you wanted them to, watch that!
Look at that disappointment, that depression you experience when you are criticized. What does that say about you?
Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy,
Don’t seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire.
if you look at it and see it for what it is really worth, if you understand how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into what I call a preference.
When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake.
Every time you are unhappy, you have added something to reality.
Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction.
You have added something by your reaction.
the error of thinking that, by changing the exterior world, you will change.
If you get yourself a new job or a new spouse or a new home or a new guru or a new spirituality, that does not change you.
change your handwriting by changi...
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change your capacity to think by chan...
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So if you want to live, you must have no permanent abode.
Nasr-ed-Din,
happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills.
Another illusion is that someone else can do this for you,
We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to love, but not to be loved.
You become happy by contact with reality.
moment-by-moment contact with reality.
Another illusion is that external events have the power to hurt you, that other people have the power to hurt you. They don’t. It’s you who give this power to them.
Don’t identify with those labels. That’s what someone else thinks.
Can you, for all your anxieties, add a single moment to your life?
Why bother about tomorrow? Get into today.
That is how you bring about change in yourself. Not by condemnation, not by calling yourself names, but by understanding what’s going on.
Whom am I hugging, Tom or my memory of him?
Perception has devastating consequences in the matter of love and human relationships.
we always hate what we fear. We always want to destroy and get rid of and avoid what we fear.
Addiction is blind, attachments are blind.
One reason we don’t perceive people clearly is evident—our emotions get in the way, our conditioning, our likes and dislikes.
Believe it or not, every concept that was meant to help us get in touch with reality ends up by being a barrier to getting in touch with reality, because sooner or later we forget that the words are not the thing. The concept is not the same as the reality.
the final barrier to finding God is the word “God” itself and the concept of God.
can only be experienced, not conceptualized.
The concept always misses or omits something extremely important, something precious that is only found in reality,
If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.
It’s a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It’s a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. But it’s also very misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you’re not experiencing reality, because reality is concrete. The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, you’ve got to intuit or experience it directly.
static whereas reality is in flux. We use the same name for Niagara Falls, but that body of w...
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if I want you to get the feel of what the flow of a river is like and I bring it to you in a bucket.
The moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static, dead.
Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows.
reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality.
