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.
It is very easy to conform to what your society or your parents and teachers tell you. That is a safe and easy way of existing; but that is not living...To live is to find out for yourself what is true.
When your child is very young, you must protect him from doing harm to himself and others, then later by precept, explaining to him what is going to be for his eventual happiness.
One does not concern oneself with the expressions, but rather with life. You are looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope when you look at the expressions of life.
Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves.
I do not know if you have ever noticed that the more you struggle to understand, the less you understand any problem. But, the moment you cease to struggle and let the problem tell you the whole story, give all its significance - then there is understanding, which means, obviously, that to understand, the mind must be quiet.
Where there is love, do what you will, it will be right action. It will never bring conflict to one's life. In the flame of love, all fear is consumed.
To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to improve their life within the prison walls; and such revolt is no revolt at all, it is just mutiny. Do you see the difference? Revolt within society is like the mutiny of prisoners who want better food, better treatment within the prison; but revolt born of understanding is an individual breaking away from society, and that is creative revolution.
The moment you venture out, something takes place in you and about you. Life comes to your aid in various ways. You may not like the form in which it comes to you - it may be misery, struggle, starvation - but when you invite life, things begin to happen.
You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself, soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy.