the way someone who has learned to swim seeks water

That's the worst kind of charity where you're doing things so you won't get a bad feeling you're guilty you're got no guts you don't have the guts to say "No, I want to be left alone".

You're a success in life when you wake up you don't have to explain anything to anyone. You don't feel the need to explain anything to anyone. You don't give a damn what anybody thinks of you or what anybody says about you. You have no worry, you're happy.

Happiness cannot be acquired, because you have it already. How can you acquire what you already have?

Step number one - get in touch with those negative feelings identify them. Step two - understand that those feelings are in you in the me not in the external world, not in other people. Step three - never identify the eye with those feelings. Feelings come and go, just as I am not mu thoughts, I am not my body cells, I am not my clothes, I am not my name, I am not my profession, I am not these feelings, I am not depressed. Depression exists right now there within me i observe it I watch it and let it be. Stop trying to fix it let it be it's all right.

You're suffering because you're asleep and you think how wonderful life would be if somebody else changed.

We always want somebody else to change, so that we will feel good but has it ever struck you that if your wife changes or your husband changes, what does that do to you? You're just as vulnerable as before, you're just as idiotic as before, you're just as asleep as before. It's you who need to change it's you who need to take the medicine.

Life is a mystery, which means your thinking mind cannot make sense out of it. For that you're got you wake up and you suddenly realise that reality is not problematic - you are the problem.

When sleeping people swing into action they just substitute one cruelty with another one injustice with another and so it goes on.

Because we see people and things not as they are but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or look at someone you get two different reactions.

It is not selfish to live your life as you see fit. The selfishness lies in demanding that someone else live their life to suit your taste or your pride or your prophet or your pleasure. That is selfish indeed.

When a monkey plays the saxophone, that doesn't make him a musician.

Those who know, do not say. Those who say, do not know. Reality cannot by put into a formula. The guru can only point out your errors. When you drop your errors, you will know truth and then you cannot say.

Neither of them knows a thing of what they're talking about, because if they did they'd shut up.

"That's a nice note you're playing, why don't you vary it a bit like the other musicians?" "Those fools! They're searching for the right note. I found it!"

You become happy by contact with reality that's what brings happiness. By a moment to moment contact with reality. That's where you find god, that's where you find happiness.

Why is it that I fall in love with one type of person and not another? Because I've got a shopping list.

Once you put river into a bucket, it stops being a river.

We're constantly somewhere else. "my favourite place is somewhere else"

The danger of attempting to change others and to change things if you yourself are not aware is that you may be changing things for your own convenience your own pride your dogmatic convictions and beliefs or just to relive your negative feelings.

This for this aloneness you don't go to the desert, you're right in the middle of people, you're enjoying them immensely, but they no longer have the power to make you happy or miserable. That's what aloneness means. so in this solitude your dependence dies and the capacity to love is born, for one no longer sees others as means of satisfying one's addiction.

Only someone who has attempted this knows the terror of the process. It is like inviting yourself to die. It is like asking the poor drug addict to give up the only happiness he has ever known and to replace it with the taste for bread and fruit and the clean fresh morning air and the sweetness of the water from the mountain stream.

To love persons means to have died to the need for persons.

Beauty is a way of looking at things.

When speed becomes hurry, that's a poison.

You will arrive the day you stop rushing.

I had no shoes and I was always complaining that I had no shoes until I met someone who had no feet.

What did enlightenment give you? When I eat I eat, when I look I look, when I hear I hear!

Get in touch with those sensations in your body and after you've done this for a while be aware of the one who is observing those sensations and say in inner league I internally say I am not those sensations I am not this body then be ware of your thinking those thought that keep going around in your mind and after a while turn attention to the one who is observing the thoughts and say I am not these thought or I am not my thoughts and then become ware of your feelings or recall some feelings that you have had in the past especially in the recent past anxiety depression guilt whatever and after a while turn your attention to the one who is observing those feelings or the one who is recalling the feelings and you say I am not these feelings I am not my feelings you say you are anxious but that is because you have identified with your anxiety I am not my anxiety you say you are depressed don't identify with the depression I am not the depression

There is only one cause of unhappiness the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so commonly held that it never occurs to you to question them.

What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head.

Can you describe light to people who have been sitting in darkness all their lives?

Inside your head there is a programming a set of demands about how things should be and about how you want things to be. It isn't you who decided how you want things to be. The programming was done by your parents, your society, your your culture, your religion, your past experiences. They are the ones that have dictated to you how the world of things and people should be and what your wants and values and tastes and attitudes and desires should be no matter where you go. Your computer, your programming goes along with you and is active and operating at each conscious moment of the day imperiously insisting that its demands be met by the world by people and by you. If the demands are met the computer allows you to be peaceful and happy. If they are not met the computer generates negative emotions within you even when you are not responsible. For instance, when other people don't live up to your expectations, the computer torments you. It torments you with frustration or anger or bitterness. For another example when things are not in your control or the future is uncertain your programming insists that you must experience anxiety, worry. Then you spend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions and you generally cope be expending a lot of more energy trying to rearrange the world of things and people around you so that the demands of your computer will be met and you will be granted a measure of precarious peace. Precarious because any moment something a trifle a delayed train a tape recorder that doesn't work a letter that doesn't arrive anything is going to be out of conformity with your computer's programming and the computer will insist that you become upset again. And so you live a pathetic existence constantly at the mercy of things and people around you trying desperately to make them conform to your computer's demands so that you will enjoy the only peace you have ever known a temporary respite from negative emotions courtesy of your computer and your programming.

The only reason why you are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that stubbornly demands that reality be rearranged to conform to its programming.

Your negative feelings are caused not by this person but by your programming

Absence of inner conflict that among humans is only found in little children and mystics.

Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people as a result they have a stranglehold on you, they control your behaviour by their approval and disapproval they hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company to send you spirit soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing people whether they be living or dead. You live by their norms conform to their standards, seek their company desire their love, you dread their ridicule, you long for their applause, you meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you, you are terrified to go against the passion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think and observe how you are just as dependent on them and enslaved by them when you control them as when they control you. For when you grip an object tightly you have gained control of the object but are also controlled by it, for you have lost the use of your hand.

But awareness may not be enough for a person whose drug is people. You must cultivate activities that you love, you must discover work that you do not merely for its utility, but for itself. Think of something that you love to do for itself whether it succeeds or not whether you are praised for it or not whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them for they are your passport to freedom and to love.

To enjoy a poem or a landscape or a piece of music is a waste of time. You must produce a poem, or a composition or a work of art. Even to produce it is of little value in itself. Your work must be known. What good is it if no one ever knows it and even it it is known that means nothing if it is not applauded and praised by people. Your work achieves maximum value if it becomes popular and sells so you are right back again into the arms and control of people.

For love itself has no object, love simply is. It may be activated but it is not created by the presence of others. It arise unprovoked within the heart, then radiates outwards to the world of things then people.

You can get someone to teach you things mechanical or scientific or mathematical like algebra or english or riding a cycle or operating a computer but in the things that really matter - life, love, truth, god, no one can teach you a thing. All they can give you is formulas. If you take those formulas you will have not reality, but reality filtered though the mind of someone else. Not truth but someone else's version of it. This applies even to your own formulas. Which will offer you not reality but reality filtered through a mind conditioned by past experience all that the mind can offer is concepts that make sense to the mind whereas reality makes no sense to the mind at all it is beyond the thought it is a mystery and so it must be grasped if it can be grasped at all beyond sort and beyond formulas.

It is only in this silence that you will see. And the moment you see the sheer concreteness and wholeness and fluidity of what you see will cause you to abandon every concept which can only portrait reality in an abstract fragmented static kind of way. in that moment of sight you will also drop every formula and book and guide and guru.

Think of a little child that is given a taste for drugs as the drug penetrates the body of the child it becomes addicted and its whole being cries out for the drug to be without the drug is so unbearable or torment that is seems preferable to die. Now this is exactly what your society did to you when you were a child. You were not allowed to enjoy the solid nutritious food of life, birth and play and the company of people and the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drugs called approval, appreciation, attention, the drug called success, prestige, power. having got a taste for these artificial stimulants you became addicted and began to dread their loss. Hence the control you now feel terror at the prospect of failure of mistakes of the criticism of others. So you become cravenly dependent on people and you have lost your freedom other now have power to make you happy or miserable and as much as you now hate the suffering that this involves you find yourself completely helpless. There is never a minute when consciously or unconsciously you are not keenly attuned to the reaction of others. Marching to the drum of their demands, rather than dancing to the melody that welds up from within your being. When you are ignored or disapproved of, you experience a loneliness so unbearable that you crawl back to people to beg for the comfort. The drug known as support, encouragement reassurance. To live with people in this state involves never-ending tension, but to live without them brings the agony of loneliness. You have lost your capacity to see them exactly as they are.

"I leave you free to be your self, to think your thoughts indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations behave in ways that you decide are to your liking" say those words and you will notice something else. The person automatically ceases to be special and important to you when you are able to honestly say those words and he or she becomes important in themselves the way a sunset or a symphony are lovely in themselves. The way a tree is special in itself and not for the fruit or the shade that it can offer you. Your beloved then will belong not to you but to everyone or to no one. Like the sunrise and the tree. Test it be saying those words again. In saying those words you have set yourself free, you are now ready to love.

The way someone who has learned to swim seeks water. because each time you are with them, where before you used to feel the oppression and tyranny or negative feelings you now actually feel an ever expanding compassion and the freedom of the skies.

That is probably the most terrifying thing a human being can undertake to do - expose himself to reality. Unprotected, unguided by any formula. To walk away from the world and into the desert as the prophets and mystics did is not to walk away from human company, but to walk away from human formulations then even though you are surrounded by people you are truly and utterly alone. What an awesome solitude, that solitude, that aloneness is silence. It is only in this silence that you will see and the moment you see the sheer concreteness and wholeness and fluidity of what you see will cause you to abandon every concept which can only portrait reality in an abstract fragmented way.

There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy.

What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head. you can as well search for an eagle's nest on the bed of an ocean as search for happiness in the world outside of you.

The fulfilment of desire can at the most bring flashes or pleasure and excitement. Don't mistake that for happiness. Your own experience should have taught you that pleasure soon becomes wearisome and excitement infallibly leads to boredom.

If you wish to attain to lasting happiness you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. Not by renouncing them or giving them up, because what you give up violently, you are forever bound to, but rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are and then whether you keep them or not they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you and you will be out of your dream at last out of your darkness your fear your unhappiness.

Spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is - a nightmare, that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand, but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness on the other. Father and mother - nightmare, wife and children, brothers and sisters - nightmare, all your possessions - nightmare. Your life as it is now - nightmare. Every single thing you cling to and have convinced yourself that you cannot be happy without - nightmare. Then you will hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters and even your own life, your life as you live it now and you will so easily take leave of all your possessions, that is you will stop clinging and this have destroyed their capacity to hurt you then at least you will experience that mysterious state that cannot be described or uttered. The state of abiding happiness and peace and you will understand how true it is that everyone who stops clinging to brothers or sisters, father, mother or children, land or houses is repaid a hundred times over and gains the state of timelessness called eternal life.

The rose has a gift that you like It is perfectly content to be itself. It has not been programmed from birth as you have been to be dissatisfied with itself. So it hasn't the slightest urge to be anything other than it is. That is why it possesses the artless grace and absence of inner conflict that among humans is only found in little children and mystics.

Always open and fresh from moment to moment then you will notice a marvelous thing happening within you. You will be flooded with the light of awareness, you will become transparent and transformed will change occur then. In you and in your surrounding. But it will not be brought about by your cunning restless ego that is forever scheming to improve others and yourself. For ever competing, comparing, coercing, serminizing, manipulating in its intolerance and its ambition thereby creating tension and conflict and resistance between you and nature.

We're all okay. We're great, there's nothing wrong with us. They put wrong ideas into our head. Somebody did.

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is desire. The uprooting of sorrow is desirelessness.

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment. The uprooting of sorrow means we are proving the dropping of attachments. How does one drop it? One only looks and sees that it is based on a false belief. The belief that without this I cannot be happy. That's false. The moment you see it's false, you're free. Good luck to you. May take you one minute may take you twenty five years, but the day you see it you're free.

People hate change. They don't want change. They want progress without change.

The picnic gets rained out. Where do you think the upset is? In the rain or in you? In the rain or in your reaction to the rain?

Spirituality means to no longer be at the mercy of any event or any person or anything.

Maturity is when you no longer blame anyone. You don't blame others, you don't blame your self. You see what's wrong and you set about remedying, do something about it.

When somebody insults you, you're not getting upset. When the letter isn't received it's sent back to the air to the man who wrote it or the woman who wrote it. You don't receive it it goes back. Why you got upset be the insult? because you took it! That's why. Silly.

Love is not condemning others. Love is understanding.

Towards evening he goes to the tree where the Sannyasi is sitting, gives him back the diamond and he says: "Could you do me a favour?" "What?" says Sannyasi. "Could you give me the riches that makes it possible for you to give this thing away so easily?"

You're coming to me and you're saying "Doctor it's awful, it really is awful". The I as your doctor I'm saying "You know I'll prescribe something for your wife, okay?" And you are're saying "Gee that already makes me feel better doctor, thanks!". You're having trouble with your wife and you want me to change her? Who's having the trouble? You, right? We'll remove the trouble, the cause of the trouble - you. But they don't understand this, they're brought up to think that everybody else has to change and the whole world has to change for them to be happy.

When you're upset your telescope is out of focus when you're upset, your window is blurred.