#1. Make a list of all your attachments and desires and to each of them say these words: “Deep down in my heart I know that even after I have got you I will not get happiness.” And ponder on the truth of those words. The fulfillment of desire can, at the most, bring flashes of pleasure and excitement. Don’t mistake that for happiness.
#2. Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is.
#3. If people want happiness so badly, why don’t they attempt to understand their false beliefs.
#4. Spend some time seeing each of the things you cling to for what it really is, a nightmare that causes you excitement and pleasure on the one hand but also worry, insecurity, tension, anxiety, fear, unhappiness and the other.
#5. People have been known to be happy even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp! It is from oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated. Only then will you experience that inner freedom from which alone all social revolution must arise for the powerful emotion, the passion that arises in your heart at the sight of social evils and impels you to action, will have its origin in reality, not in your programming or your ego.
#6. If you wish to be happy the first thing you need is not effort or even goodwill or good desires but a clear understanding of how exactly you have been programmed.
#7. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things-money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God – they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?
#8. In order to be genuinely happy there is one and only one thing you need to do: get deprogrammed, get rid of those attachments.
#9. At attachment isn’t a fact. It is a belief, a fantasy in your head, acquired through programming.
#10. The nature of attachments is such, that even if you satisfy many of them in the course of a single day, the one attachment is such, that even if you satisfy many of them in the course of a single day, the one attachment that was not satisfied will prey upon your mind and make you unhappy.
#11. Has it occurred to you that you can keep all the objects of your attachments without giving them up, without renouncing a single one of them and you can enjoy them even more on a non-attachment, a non clinging basis, because you are peaceful now and relaxed and unthreatened in your enjoyment of them?
#12. It is precisely your attachments that prevent you from developing a wider and more varied taste for things and people.
#13. Love can only exist in freedom.
#14. Ask yourself this question “Am I in charge of this situation or is this situation in charge of me?”
#15. The ability to do evil or to be evil is not freedom but a sickness for it implies a lack of consciousness and sensitivity.
#16. It is said that love is blind. But is it? Actually nothing on earth is as clear sighted as love.
#17. Do you have any attachments-people or things that you falsely believe you could not be happy without? Make a list of them and study exactly how they blind you.
#18. To be in a state of love you must be sensitive to the uniqueness and beauty of every single thing and person around you.
#19. There is an enormous amount of information that is continuously flowing in from the world through the senses, the tissues of the organs of your body. Only a small part of this reaches your conscious mind.
#20. Your spirit becomes unclogged and your senses open…. you will begin to perceive things as they really are and to interact with reality and you will be entranced by the harmonies of the universe.
#21. It is only when you drop your beliefs, your fears and the attachments that breed them that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and to the world.
#22. The moment you pick up an attachment, the functioning of this lovely apparatus called the human heart is destroyed.
#23. No person or thing outside of you has the power to make you happy or unhappy.
#24. You must choose between your attachments and happiness. You cannot have both. The moment you pick up an attachment, your heart is thrown out of kilter and your ability to lead a joyful life is destroyed. See how true this is when applied to the attachment that you have chose.
#25. Have the courage to see how prejudiced and blind you have become in the presence of an object or your attachment.
#26. If your attachments have caused you suffering and sorrow, that’s a help to understanding.
#27. If you hold on to an idea about someone then you no longer love that person but your idea about that person.
#28. A habit is essential to human living. How would we ever walk or speak or drive a car unless we relied on habit? But habits must be limited to things mechanical-not to love or to sight.
#29. Realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates. Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls.
#30. Contemplate the prison walls, spend hours just observing your ideas, habits, your attachments and your fears without any judgement and condemnation. Look at them and they will crumble.
#31. Look, but really look as if for the very first time, at the face of a friend a leaf, a tree, a bird in flight, the behavior and mannerisms of the people around you. Really see them and hopefully you will see them afresh as they are in themselves without the dulling, stupefying effect of your ideas and habits.
#32. Sit down quietly and observe how your mind functions.
#33. Can you even be said to be alive if you are not even conscious of your own thoughts and reactions? The unaware life it is said is not worth living. It cannot even be called life; it is a mechanical, robot existence; a sleep, and unconsciousness, a death; and yet this is what people call human life!
#34. The first quality of holiness is its unself-consciousness.
#35. Effort can perform acts of service, it is powerless to produce love or holiness.
#36. Change is only brought about by awareness and understanding.
#37. Understand your unhappiness and it will disappear – what results is the state of happiness.
#38. Understand your fears and they will melt – the resultant state is love.
#39. Love and freedom and happiness are not things that you can cultivate and produce. You cannot even know what they are. All you can do is observe their opposites and, through your observation, cause their opposites to die.
#40. Would you be tormented by jealousy and envy if you were content to be what you are and never aspired to what you are not?
#41. The way to self understanding requires complete freedom from all desire to change what you are into something else. You will see this if you compare the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without the slightest desire to change them with the attitude of a dog trainer who studies the habits of a dog with the view to making it learn something. If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things, without judgement or condemnation or desire to reform yourself, your desire will be non selective, comprehensive, never fixed on rigid conclusions, always open and fresh from moment to moment. You will be flooded with light awareness. You will become transparent and transformed.
#42. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.
#43. The cure for lovelessness and loneliness is not company but contact with Reality. The moment you touch this reality you will know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people- and so the ability to love them.
#44. If you desire this love to exist in your life you must break loose from your inward dependence on people by becoming aware of it and by engaging in activities that you love to do for themselves.
#45. You can get someone to teach you things mechanical or scientific or mathematical like algebra or English or riding a cycle or operating a computer. But in the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can teach you a thing.
#46. Is there any way you can know that what you are in touch with is reality? Here is on sign: What you perceive does not fit into any formula whether given by another or created by yourself.
#47. To walk alone – that means to walk away from every formula – the ones given to you by others, the ones you learned from books, the ones that you yourself invented in the light of your own past experience.
#48. Meaning is a formula, something that can be put into concepts and makes sense to the thinking mind.
#49. Observe the marvelous change that comes over you the moment you stop seeing people as good and bad, as saints and sinners and begin to see them as unaware and ignorant.
#50. Love so enjoys the loving that is blissfully unaware of itself.
#51. Love simply is, it has no objective.
#52. Think for a while of all the coercion and control that you submit to on the part of others when you so anxiously live up to their expectations in order to buy their love and approval or because you fear you will lose them. Each time you submit to this control and this coercion you destroy the capacity to love which is your very nature, for you cannot but do to others what you allow others to do to you.
#49. Freedom is just another word for love.
#50. How can you be sensitive to someone you do not even see?
#51. Every time you find yourself irritated or angry with someone, the one to look at is not that person but yourself. The question to ask is not, “What’s wrong with this person?” but “What does this irritation tell me about myself?”
#52. If you wish to get in touch with the reality of a thing, the first thing you must understand is that every idea distorts reality and is a barrier to seeing reality.
#54. If you judge, condemn, approve, do ever see reality?
#55. Love that is born of sensitivity takes many unexpected forms and it responds not to prefabricated guidelines and principles but to present, concrete reality.
#56. If you ever allow yourself to see it will be the death of you. And that is why love is so terrifying, for to love is to see and to see is to die. But it is also the most delightful exhilarating experiences in the world world. For in the death of the ego is freedom, peace, serenity, joy.
#57. Love is the passport to abiding joy and peace and freedom.
#58. What is love? It is a sensitivity to every portion of reality within you and without, together with a wholehearted response to that reality.
#59. What is an attachment? A need, a clinging that blunts your sensitivity, a drug that clouds your perception. As long as you have the slightest attachment for anything or any person, love cannot be born.
#60. It is only when attachments disappear that one enters the boundless realm of spiritual freedom called love.
#61. Think of some of the painful events in your life. For how many of them are you grateful today, because thanks to them you change and grew?
#62. Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons and situations that cause us pain.
#63. Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation.
#64. Think of some recent event that caused you pain, that produced negative feelings in you. Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your teacher, because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not know.
#65. If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future.
#66. As long as your happiness is caused or sustained by something or someone outside of you, you are still in the land of the dead. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom.
#67. Mostly people are not prepared to see till they have suffered repeated disillusionment and sorrow.
#68. If you search within your heart you will find something there that will make it possible for you to understand: a spark of disenchantment and discontent, which if fanned into flame will become a raging forest fire that will burn up the whole of the illusory world you are living in, thereby unveiling to your wondering eyes the kingdom that you have always lived in unsuspectingly.
#69. Now is the time to see that absolutely nothing outside of you can bring you lasting joy.
#70. When we don’t accept or follow, but question, investigate, penetrate, there is an insight out of which comes creativity, joy.
#71. Has it ever struck you that those who most fear to die are the ones who most fear to live? That in running away from death we are running away from life?
#72. So you fear life and you fear death because you cling. When you cling to nothing, when you have no fear of losing anything, then you are free to flow like the mountain stream that is always fresh and sparkling and alive.
#73. Do you want a way to measure the degree of your rigidity and your deadness? Observe the amount of pain you experience when you lose a cherished idea or person or thing. The pain and the grief betray your clinging, do they not?
#74. In order to live you must look reality in the face and then you will shed your fear of losing people and develop a taste for newness and change and uncertainty. You will shed your fear of losing the known and the expectantly wait and welcome the unfamiliar and the unknown.
#75. Truth is essentially mystery. The mind can sense but cannot grasp it, much less formulate it. Our beliefs can point to it but cannot put it into words.
#76. Effort does not lead to growth; effort, whatever form it may take, whether it be will-power or habit or technique or a spiritual exercise, does not lead to change. At best it leads to repression and a covering over of the root disease.
#77. You truly win the love of others not by the practice of techniques but by being a certain kind of person. And that is never achieved through effort and techniques.
#78. Holiness is not an achievement, it is Grace. Grace called awareness, a grace called looking, observing, understanding.
#79. Attachments can only thrive in the darkness of illusion. The rich man cannot enter the kingdom of joy not because he wants to be bad but because he chooses to be blind.