We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.
There is nothing wrong with our country, there is something wrong with our politics...When this country is operating off a common ground, nobody can stop us. But when we're divided, then we end up having a whole lot of self-inflicted problems.
The highest truth needs no communicating, for it is by its very nature self-propelling. It radiates its influence silently as the rose its fragrance without the intervention of a medium.
Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.
If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
Leaving behind the false, return to the true: make no discriminations between self and others. In contemplation, one's mind should be stable and unmoving, like a wall.
And the dream that our mind had sketched in haste Shall others continue, but never complete. For none upon earth can achieve his scheme; The best as the worst are futile here: We wake at the self-same point of the dream, All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.
To understand the present with its full, rich significance, the mind must free itself from the habit of self-protecting acquisition; when it is utterly naked, then there is immortality.