It is very difficult to be like the other guy, to be ordinary. Mediocrity takes a great deal of energy. But to be ourselves is very easy. You don't have to do a thing.Collection: Being Yourself
It is raining and you can hear the pattern of the drops. You can hear it with your ears, or you can hear it out of that deep silence. If you hear it with complete silence of the mind, then the beauty of it is such that cannot be put into words or onto canvas, because that beauty is something beyond self-expression .Collection: Rain
When the wind blows across the various continents, it does not bring with it the nationalities of the countries through which it passes. So likewise with Life.Collection: Country
Living is not this tawdry, mediocre, disciplined thing which we call our existence. Living is something entirely different; it is abundantly rich, timelessly changing, and as long as we don't understand that eternal movement, our lives are bound to have very little meaning.Collection: Spiritual
National discord is, like religion, a standardized form of revolt; and the moment a revolt is standardized, it is no longer a revolt.Collection: Moments
To understand what is right meditation there must be an awareness of the operation of one's own consciousness, and then there is complete attention.Collection: Spiritual
Find out for yourself what are the possesions and ideals that you do not desire. By knowing what you do not want, by elimination, you will unburden the mind, and only then will it understand the essential which is ever there.Collection: Knowing
The becoming still can never be the being still; only with the death of becoming is there being.Collection: Ego
Freedom from something is not freedom.Collection: Freedom
If I do not understand myself, the whole complexity of myself, I have no basis for thinking.Collection: Thinking
It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.Collection: Spiritual
You yourself are the teacher, and the pupil, you're the master, you're the guru, you are the leader, you are everything! And, to understand is to transform what is.Collection: Teacher
When you say that I have followers, let me assure you that I do not want followers, nor would I ever encourage the idea of following.Collection: Ideas
As long as the mind is in conflict-blaming, resisting, condemning-there can be no understanding. If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you, obviously.Collection: Long
War is a stage brought about by the standardizing of thought, revolt, and life - not by the freedom of life, not by the revolt of life.Collection: War
Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Life
Perception without the word, which is without thought, is one of the strangest phenomena. Then the perception is much more acute, not only with the brain, but also with all the senses. Such perception is not the fragmentary perception of the intellect nor the affair of the emotions. It can be called a total perception, and it is part of meditation.Collection: Meditation
When you practice meditation, the meditator becomes all-important and not the movement of meditation.Collection: Practice
When inquiry is suppressed by previous knowledge, or by the authority and experience of another, then learning becomes mere imitation, and imitation causes a human being to repeat what is learned without experiencing it.Collection: Education
In the space which thought creates around itself there is no love. This space divides man from man, and in it is all the becoming, the battle of life, the agony and fear. Meditation is the ending of this space, the ending of the me.Collection: Love
Can the mind become completely still without coercion, without compulsion, without discipline?Collection: Discipline
Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else.Collection: Spiritual
So through identification you have pleasure and pain.Collection: Pain
The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself.Collection: Spiritual
You may be ignorant of all the books in the world, and I hope you are, of all the latest theories, but that is not ignorance.Collection: Spiritual
Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing.Collection: Flower
The Hindu, the Oriental, says that the physical is but the shadow of the Eternal, of the Truth; and he says 'In order to understand the Truth, I must let the shadow go, and not concern myself with it, but with the understanding of the Eternal.' So he does not concern himself with the physical. He is more concerned with the quality of mind and heart. Hence there is disease, there is disorder, and there is chaos and neglect and the gradual running down of the physical.Collection: Running
To know oneself is to study oneself in action, which is relationship.Collection: Spiritual
Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.Collection: Hands
Of course it is better to emphasize the unity of human beings rather than to emphasize the diversity of forms, that is to say, the man and the woman separately. If you have separate organizations for men and women you will tend to set them apart from each other, which is what often happens at present and is absurd!Collection: Men
So let us decide whether you want a shelter, a safety zone, which will no longer yield conflict, whether you want to escape from the present conflict to enter a condition in which there shall be no conflict; or whether you are unaware, unconscious of this conflict in which you exist. If you are unconscious of the conflict, that is, the battle that is taking place between that self and the environment, if you are unconscious of that battle, then why do you seek further remedies? Remain unconscious.Collection: Love
In the search for reality, energy creates its own discipline. But mere discipline, without full comprehension of all this, has no meaning, it is a most destructive thing.Collection: Spiritual
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.Collection: Dance
We never see a tree except through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. Look at a tree and you will find how extraordinarily difficult it is to see it completely, so that no image, no screen, comes between the seeing and the actual fact. By completely I mean with the totality of your mind and heart, not a fragment of it.Collection: Tree
My contention is that it is impossible to limit Truth, for that would mean that you were stepping down the Truth to the individual, who is limited. It would be useless to lay down a crystallized method for everyone to follow.Collection: Mean
Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.Collection: Order
It is only the religious mind that is a truly revolutionary mind.Collection: Religious
Meditation is not a process of learning how to meditate; it is the very inquiry into what is meditation. To inquire into what is meditation, the mind must free itself from what it has learnt about meditation, and the freeing of the mind from what it has learnt is the beginning of meditation.Collection: Meditation
But our minds are bound to the yardstick of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and with that yardstick we try to inquire into the unknown, to measure that which is not measurable.Collection: Time
If you set out to meditate, it will not be meditation. If you set out to be good, goodness will never flower.Collection: Spiritual
You may be reborn a thousand times, but you can never know the real, for only that which dies, that which comes to an end, can renew itself.Collection: Inspirational
You cannot prevent a man getting drunk if he wishes to do so, but when he becomes a nuisance, then you interfere.Collection: Men
And it is impossible to treat human beings as human beings if you label them, if you term them, if you give them a name as Hindus, Russians, or what you will. It is so much easier to label people, for then you can pass by and kick them, drop a bomb on India or Japan.Collection: Self Esteem
Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, to think we are separate entities with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavor and struggle.Collection: Struggle
What is the difference between attention and inattention? What is attention and what is concentration? ...Attention has no centre.Collection: Differences
Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.Collection: Mind
I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.Collection: Philosophy