There is always great beauty, not of images, feeling or thought. Beauty is neither thought nor feeling; it has nothing whatsoever to do with emotion or sentiment. There is fear. Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present. When there is fear in the active present, is it fear? It is there and there is no escape from it, no evasion possible. There, at that actual moment, there is total attention at the moment of danger, physical or psychological.
It is only the dull, sleepy mind that creates and clings to habit. A mind that is attentive from moment to moment - attentive to what it is saying, attentive to the movement of its hands, of its thoughts, of its feelings - will discover that the formation of further habits has come to an end.
If I do not know reality, the unknown, how can I search for it? Surely it must come but I cannot go after it. If I go after it I am going after something which is the known, projected by me; by my own mind.
And the point is, is it possible for the mind to be totally free from suffering and yet not become indifferent, callous, irresponsible, but to have that passion, the intensity, the energy that freedom brings, freedom from suffering.
If you would listen, sir, in the sense of being aware of your conflicts and contradictions without forcing them into any particular pattern of thought, perhaps they might altogether cease.
We are empty shells if we do not possess, if we do not fill our life with furniture, with music, with knowledge, with this or that. And that shell makes a lot of noise, and that noise we call living, and with that we are satisfied.
The crisis is not in the outward technological advancement, but rather in the way we think, and the way we live, and the way we feel. I think that is where a revolution must take place.
Freedom of life does not mean disorder of life, does not mean chaos, and just everyone doing anything he wants. That is not the freedom of life. The tree, when you give it a chance, protect it when it is young, will grow straight, because it has developed its own resistance; but the moment you make it delicate, then it gets crooked.
Through self-knowledge you begin to find out what is God, what is truth, what is that state which is timeless. In self-knowledge is the whole universe; it embraces all the struggles of humanity.
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
When the mind goes beyond the thought of 'the me,' the experiencer, the observer, the thinker, then there is a possibility of a happiness that is incorruptible.