If you have the desire, if you establish the goal - which is harmony, which is happiness through liberation- then these stages of revolt, of war, of struggle, can be avoided - should be avoided. You are not going to wallow in the gutter if you can jump over it.
Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no 'me; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action.
Throughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself.
True understanding is possible only when we are fully conscious of our thought, not as an operative observer on this thought, but completely and without the intervention of a choice.
When we stop learning in our relationship, whether we are studying, playing or whatever we are doing, and merely act from the knowledge we have accumulated, then disorder comes.
The reality of truth is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thought, in the fullness of love.
Fear is the process of the mind in the struggle of becoming. In becoming good there is the fear of evil; in becoming complete, there is the fear of loneliness.
That is the first thing to learn - not to seek. When you seek you are really only window-shopping. 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, philosophers 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. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.
When I analyse myself and my reactions or behaviour, there is the act and the actor. There is a division between the two and that creates conflict between "what is" and "what should be".
Meditation is not the pursuit of pleasure and the search for happiness. Meditation, on the contrary, is a state of mind in which there is no concept or formula, and therefore total freedom. It is only to such a mind that this bliss comes unsought and uninvited. Once it is there, though you may live in the world with all its noise, pleasure and brutality, they will not touch that mind.
Only when the mind is still, tranquil, not expecting or grasping or resisting a single thing, is it possible to see what is true. It is the truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.