As long as the mind is in conflict-blaming, resisting, condemning-there can be no understanding. If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you, obviously.
Try to relax, and you will find out that you feel more tense than ever. Try harder and you will feel more tense and more tense. Relaxation is not a consequence, is not a result of some activity; it is the glow of understanding. This is the first thing I would like to relate to you: life is purposeless. It is very hard to accept it. And why is it so hard to accept that life is purposeless? It is hard because without purpose the ego cannot exist. It is hard to conceive that life has no goal because without any goal being there, there is no point in having a mind, in having an ego.
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
There is only that inevitable danger as long as there is lack of understanding; but the moment the individual understands, there will be no formation of religion.
Words have divided man from woman,
one from another, this from that,
until only sages know how to put things together.
Without words, without even understanding,
lovers find each other.
The moment of finding is always a surprise,
like meeting an old friend never before known.
The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.
The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappinessdoes not unite people, but separates them.
A science of all these possible kinds of space [the higher dimensional ones] would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry... If it is possible that there could be regions with other dimensions, it is very likely that God has somewhere brought them into being.
True love in this differs from gold and clay, that to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, gazing on many truths.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.