Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war.
Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.
Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.
You know you're old when someone compliments you on your alligator shoes, and you're barefoot.
If you don't have wrinkles, you haven't laughed enough.
This is love: the flowering of love is meditation.
The environment that we call society is created by past generations; we accept it, as it helps us to maintain our greed, possessiveness, illusion.
We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.
The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher's or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself - Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.
Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.
For most of us, relationship with another is based on dependence, either economic or psychological. This dependence creates fear, breeds in us possessiveness, results in friction, suspicion, frustration.
In seeking comfort, we generally find a quiet corner in life where there is a minimum of conflict, and then we are afraid to step out of that seclusion.
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.
A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.
We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.
To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself.
All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.
A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.
Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.
Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.