Status Updates From Freedom from the Known

‘Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.’

‘It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and dissapointed because it is denied to you.’

‘Have you ever noticed that when you respond to something totally, with all your heart, there is very little memory? It is only when you do not respond to a challenge with your whole being that there is a conflict, a struggle, and this brings confusion and pleasure or pain. And the struggle breeds memory. Anything that is the result of memory is old and therefore never free.’

‘Attention is not the same as concentration. Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes nothing. It seems to me that most of us are not aware, not only of what we are talking about but if our environment, the colours around us, the people, the shape of the trees, the clouds, the movement of the water.’

‘If you are learning all of the time, learning every minute, learning by watching and listening, learning by seeing and doing, then you will find that learning is a constant movement without the past. Learning implies great sensitivity. There is no sensitivity if there is an idea, which is of the past, dominating the present. Most of us are not sensitive even physically.’

‘Every other form of understanding is merely an abstraction and I cannot study myself in abstraction; I am not an abstract entity; therefore I have to study myself in actuality — as I am, not as I wish to be.’

‘It is no use sitting in a corner meditating about myself. I cannot exist by myself. I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself.’

‘If you do not follow somebody you feel lonely. Be lonely then.’

‘We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment.’