Quotations

Miscellaneous Quotes

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When we see men of a contrary character,
we should turn inwards
and examine ourselves. -Confucius

Zen is like soap.
First, you wash with it.
Then, you wash off the soap. --Yamaoka Tesshu

Let birds of sorrow
Fly over the head;
Do not allow them to build their nests
And multiply in you.

Prayer is born of faith.
Faith is the soul's vision
of possibility and belief in what you do not see.
The result is seeing what you first believed through faith.

In this life
We are mere travellers.
Let us travel light
and shed excess baggage.

Creativity comes
when we view our situation in a fresh way.

Children who have what Arthur Koestler calls "innocence of perception"
possess an innate ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Their's is a zen-like "mindfulness."
They observe non-judgmentally.
Their imagination is uncorrupted by outside constraints.
In play, they pay passionate attention to activities. Time stands still.
But in later years, the world intrudes
and many develop what Montague called "psycho-sclerosis," a hardening of the attitudes.
Re-visioning -- reclaiming the childlike vision -- takes courage.
Occasionally, it requires sacrificing deeply held perspectives.

To be great, be whole.
Exclude nothing,
Exaggerate nothing that is you.
Be whole in everything.
Put all you are into the smallest thing you do.
The whole moon gleams in every pool,
it rides so high.

Whoever fights monsters
should see to it that in the process
he does not become a monster.
And when you look long into an abyss
the abyss looks into you.

Do not go where the path may lead;
go instead where there is no path,
and leave a trail.

Bitterness imprisons life;
love releases it.

Use what talents you possess.
The woods would be very silent
if no birds sang except those that sang best.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground,
but a kind word is never thrown away.

We are here on Earth
to do good for others.
What the others are here for,
I do not know.

Muddy water-
let stand, becomes clear.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.
We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Don't put the key to your happiness
in someone else's pocket.

Although the world is very full of suffering,
it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Knock, And He'll open the door.
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun.
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens.
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.
It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

Not everything that can be counted counts,
and not everything that counts can be counted.

The highest happiness of man ...
is to have probed what is knowable
and quietly to revere what is unknowable.

Life is like a roll of toilet paper:
the closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes.

The less time we have to work with,
the more things we get done.

It is not death that a man should fear.
He should fear never beginning to live.

Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you,
but it is most important that you do it.

Drum-sound rises on the air;
its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat says:
"I know you're tired, but come.
This is the way."

Chance is always powerful.
Let your hook be always cast in the pool;
where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

To be surprised, to wonder,
is to begin to understand.

He who wonders
discovers that this in itself is wonder.

The longest journey of any person
is the journey inward.

The universe is full of magical things,
patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
You can observe a lot by watching.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

I would rather live in a world
where my life is surrounded by mystery
than live in a world so small
that my mind could comprehend it.

One does not discover new lands
without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

A good traveler has no fixed plans,
and is not intent on arriving.

Bitterness imprisons life;
Love releases it.

Shoot for the moon.
Even if you miss it,
you will land among the stars.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. (Gandhi)

What lies behind us
and what lies before us
are tiny matters
compared to
what lies within us.

Be yourself.
The world worships the original.
Nobody can be exactly like me.
Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.

This above all:
to thine own self be true.

Be tender without being weak.
Be compassionate
without unduly identifying with the woes of others.
Be firm to correct error,
without feeling condemnation for those who err.

Dr. Phil's Ten Life Strategies:

Life Law #1	You either get it, or you don't.
Strategy	Become one of those who gets it.
Life Law #2	You create your own experience.
Strategy	Acknowledge and accept accountability for your life.
Life Law #3	People do what works.
Strategy	Identify the payoffs that drive your behavior and that of others.
Life Law #4	You cannot change what you do not acknowledge.
Strategy	Get real with yourself about your life and everybody in it.
Life Law #5	Life rewards action.
Strategy	Make careful decisions and then pull the trigger.
Life Law #6	There is no reality; only perception.
Strategy	Identify the filters through which you view the world.
Life Law #7	Life is managed; it is not cured.
Strategy	Learn to take charge of your life.
Life Law #8	We teach people how to treat us.
Strategy	Own, rather than complain about, how people treat you.
Life Law #9	There is power in forgiveness.
Strategy	Open your eyes to what anger and resentment are doing to you.
Life Law #10	You have to name it before you can claim it.

There is a plan to my life
but it's not always my plan.
God's way is not always my way.
Lord, Yours Will be done.

There is no such thing as the best time in our lives;
each decade just gets better and better.

As long as we keep growing and learning,
there is no time when we look back and think:
'That was the best time of my life.'

The Clock of Life
The clock of life is wound but once
and no man has the power to tell
just when the hands will stop,
at late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own, live, love,
toil with a Will.
Place no faith in 'tomorrow,'
for the clock may then be still.

Our companionship with Jesus
always keeps giving us new neighbors, even in many religions;
he sends us to meet our brothers and sisters,
to dwell among them, to share their bread and wine,
to be healed and brought back to life by them.
In the end,
we just keep trying to know God more deeply
within our tradition and memory,
even as God keeps coming to us
from beyond everything we have imagined until now.
We keep trying to cross the boundaries
we necessarily set for ourselves,
and then to see, love and serve God
in ten thousand places, in every bladeof grass:
Deus semper maior ,
God over there, just ahead of us, right now.

In that time when I did not know you,
you made me love your service.
In the midst of my unknowing confusion,
you made me your servant.
Disguised as a dwarf,
you asked three steps of earth.
Great king Bali, you tricked him unawares,
and now you've mingled inside myself.
In return for the great gift
of your mingling inside myself,
I ended up giving you my self;
so now what other return can I make?
You are the self of my self,
my father who ate the seven worlds.
Who is my self? Who am I?
It's what you've made it, you who gave it.
(Tiruvaymozhi II.3-4) translation by Francis X. Clooney, S.J..

As a mother with her life
will guard her child, her only child,
let my follower extend unboundedly
his heart to every living being.
With love for all the world
let him extend unboundedly
his heart, above, below, around,
unchecked, with no ill-will or hate.
Whether he stands, or sits, or walks, or rests.
may my follower always pursue this mindfulness.
[From the Sutta Nipata I.8]

Tirupati

After passing through the temple's outer precincts,
one moves closer and closer to its center
and finally into a small and narrow dark corridor about five yards long,
barely high enough for me to stand erect.
It was illumined only by small oil lamps,
and smelled richly of a thousand years of incense and fresh flowers.
At the end of this passageway,
there stands, nestled against the wall,
the dark stone image of Vishnu,
the Lord of the mountain.
For the devotee, this is the point,
to have darshan, to see here
the cosmic Lord who has taken physical form,
and to be seen by him;
an exchange of glances that is received as pure gift.
God reaching the devotee,
not the other way around. (on a visit to Tirumala temple)

If we listen, then we learn to speak.

It's a proverb in India:
"Every ending is just a beginning."

When we have finally told our life-stories,
we can begin to live them again, and more richly.

Listening opens into confession,
confession draws us into a deeper
and richer experience of being alive.
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,
and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed
thou hast carried over hills and dales,
and hast breathed through it,
melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands
my little heart loses its limits in joy
and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me
only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest,
and still there is room to fill. [Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore]

BIBLE

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on his servant in her lowliness.
Henceforth all generations will call me blessed,
for the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name...
He has filled the hungry with good things,
He has sent the rich away empty. [Luke 1 RSV]

Venkatachalapathi

In all times present, past and future
you are my mother, father, life;
I have reached you, so can I let you go,
lord of the three worlds filled with your ancient praise,
highest one, dweller in cool Venkatam,
bearer of the cool fragrant tulasi garland ?
...........................................................
It is our desire to abide for time-without-end
and offer perfect service to our father, our fathers' father,
the beautiful light at Venkatam of the roaring cascades.
He is the ancestor of our father's father's father's father,
that great dark one, beautiful,
endlessly praised,by the heaven dwellers and their lord,
at Venkatam where red flowers delight.
...........................................................
They sing the many names of our father in northern holy Venkatam
with its lovely cool cascades and babbling
they enter the many towns, and some times they don't,
and people call them crazy;
they keep dancing, and the world laughs at them,
and still they worship with great devotion:
even the gods worship them.
(Tiruvaymoli II.6.10; III.3.1-3;5.8)

Your color is the color of a lovely cloud, so dark, Lord of miracles, ambrosia that seeps
sweetness into my mind, commander of the gods, lord of holy Venkatam where clear
waterfalls crash spilling gems, gold and pearls: great One, just say, "Ah,there he is!"
and bring this servant to your feet. You don't come as you came, as you didn't come,
you come; eyes like red lotuses, lips like red fruit, four-shouldered one, ambrosia,
my life, lord of holy Venkatam where glowing gems make night into day:
alas, this servant cannot be away from your feet even for a moment. "I cannot be away even
for a moment," says the maiden on the flower who dwells on your chest; you are unmatched
in fame, owner of the three worlds, my ruler, lord of holy Venkatam where peerless
immortals and crowds of sages delight: with no place to enter, this servant has entered right
beneath your feet. (Tiruvaymoli VI.10.3,9,10)

Bible: (Psalm 63.1-8)
O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee,
as in a dry and weary land where no water is. So I have looked on thee in thy sanctuary,
beholding thy power and glory. Because thy steadfast love is betterthan life, my lips will
praise thee. So I will please thee as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on thy
name. My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat, and my mouth praises thee with joyful lips,
when I think of thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the watches of the night;
for thou hast been my help, and in the shadow of thy wings I sing for joy.

My soul clings to thee; thy right hand upholds me. (Psalm 63.1-8)

"The Dangerous Age"
It is that point in a woman's life when her children are grown,
when she can finally say out loud
that she is married to the wrong man and
hasn't had a fulfilling romantic relationship
in well over a decade.
She is a little desperate, a little sad
a litle angry, a little lonely,
wanting to jump ship but not sure she can swim.
It's so common, it's almost generic subject matter.
We wait to see which sculpture the author will fashion it from:
Anna Karenina? Emma Bovary? Erica Jong?
If a woman takes a risk for her own happiness,
will she be happy in the end
or will she be punished?

How else,
except through a broken heart,
may God enter?

Everybody exists.
It is ony the few who live.

True words are not beautiful.
Beautiful words are not true.

A good man does not argue;
he who argues is not a good man.

There are two kinds of people
who do not need scriptures or dogmas:
One is the fool;
the other is the Full One.
The fool thinks he knows
and does not care to read.
The Full One already knows
and does not need a book.

A wise man has no extensive knowledge;
He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man.
My Teacher once said to me:
Become one with the knot itself,
till it dissolves away.

Your enemy is your greatest friend.
Under the bludgeonings of your enemy,
you raise your head,
bloody, but unbowed.

A "Sthithapragna'' is one who is not mute
but gloriously articulates
without any extravagances of thought or style,
but taut and supple, like tempered steel.

Material progress alone is not sufficient
to achieve an ideal society.
Mental development
in harmony with material development
is important.

Lack of self confidence is not overcome
merely by faith, but by action.
It is a lack,
not of certainty, but of effort.
Too often,
we are certain that we can't,
even before we give ourselves a fair chance.

"If Hot Flowers Come to the Street"

By R. Meenakshi

Red cassia flowers
are a forest fire,
or so they say.
It's an April event
called a summer fire.
Anarchy in green;
An explosion of buds.
Fire in the snow
On the head of Lord Shiva
of the snow mountains
there are red matted locks,
gleaming cassia flowers,
and the Ganga.
In his red hand,
fire,
a small drum,
a deer.
And a snake
at his throat.
That snake
won't strike the deer.
The fire in his hand
won't burn the Ganga.
But in our street
even flies
will swarm to hot flowers. (Translated from the original in Tamil)

We build our lives in a distracted way, reacting rather than acting,
willing to put up with less than the best.
At important points
we do not give the job our best effort.
Then with a shock
we look at the situation we have created
and find that
we are now living in the house we have built.
If we had realized earlier,
we would have done it differently.

Think of yourself as the carpenter
Who builds your house.
Each day you hammer a nail,
place a board, or erect a wall,
Build wisely.
It is the only life you will ever build.
Even if you live it for only one day more,
that day deserves to be lived graciously
and with dignity.

The plaque on the wall says,
"Life is a do-it-yourself project"
Who could say it more clearly?
Your life today is the result
of your attitudes and choices in the past.
Your life tomorrow will be the result
of your attitudes and the choices you make today.

Nothing in life is to be feared.
It is only to be understood.

Do not be afraid to be afraid.

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
but the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

The nature of God is a circle
of which the center is everywhere
and the circumference is nowhere.

Dream lofty dreams,
And as you dream, so shall you become.
Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be;
Your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.
Cherish your vision and your dreams
As they are the children of your soul,
the blue prints of your ultimate achievements.

Begin doing what you want to do NOW.
We are not living in eternity.
We have only this moment,
sparkling like a star in our hand
and melting like a snowflake.

The past should be a springboard,
not a hammock.

Solitude is painful when one is young,
but delightful when one is more mature.

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock,
the stream always wins;
not through strength,
but through perseverance.

A man is but the product of his thoughts;
What he thinks, he becomes.
Yath Bhavah, thath bhavathi

We do not what we ought;
What we ought not, we do;
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through.
But our own acts, for good or ill,
are mightier power

The will is free.
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful.
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we,
Bards, saints, heroes,
if we will !

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour!

The term `myth' is not a synonym for fiction.
Myth is the word used to express
The inexpressible in human experience.
In mythical expressions or tales,
the truth is not in the description
but in the meaning or insight they communicate.

When the Gita was written, although people believed in ahimsa, wars were not only
not taboo, but nobody observed the contradiction between them and ahimsa..........
Let it be granted that according to the letter of the Gita it is possible to say that warfare
is consistent with renunciation of fruit. But after forty years' unremitting endeavour fully
to enforce the teaching of Gita in my own life, I have, in all humility, felt that perfect
renunciation is impossible without perfect observance of ahimsa in every shape and form.
{Gandhi)

The mark of your ignorance
Is the depth of your belief
in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world,
The master calls a butterfly.

There is no such thing as a problem
without a gift for you in its hands.
You seek problems
because you need their gifts.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent

The Wise-man:
Without inflaming himself, is kindled;
Without explaining himself, is explained;
Without taking credit, is accredited;
Laying no claim, he is acclaimed;
And because he does not compete,
finds peaceful competence.
To know the Truth,
One must get rid of knowledge.

You teach best
what you need most to learn.
"There are other broadcasts,
on wavelengths that do not appear on our cable box,
other commentaries
which do not appear in the back pages of newspapers.

These natural broadcasts are timeless --
the sense of the presence of the divine, for instance,
that has marked human beings in every culture
as far back as anthropologists can go
and that we now try unsuccessfully
to buy from evangelists or crystal merchants.
These broadcasts are low, resonant only in stillness;
they are easily jammed.
We don't have to be in the woods to hear them,
but we have to be quiet.

What do these broadcasts concern?
Nothing new; nothing novel.
Only the most basic information,
the sort that can ground us to reality,
that we are part, a seamless part,
of something very much bigger.
This is an almost incomprehensible notion for us.
What we need is not additional information --
we have, the least-informed of us,
more information than a king two centuries ago.
What we need is
more silence and solitude,
more reflection to put in context what we know.

Desire and anger are like two sides of the coin;
when one is denied the other shows up.

Unraveling nature's secrets in its totality
is man's ultimate aim.
His ally is science and his victories are considered
as so many conquests over unyielding nature.
Nature is viewed an enemy
to be conquered, mastered, possessed and enjoyed.
But by whom?
The individual and not the collective,
because, man's mind --
each creates its own individual universe.
The multitude of these universes
continually clash with each other.

Science is not a neutral commodity
which can be employed as a convenience
by people wishing to partake only of material power.
Rather, it is spiritually corrosive,
burning away ancient authorities and traditions.
It cannot really co-exist with anything.
Scientists inevitably take on the mantle
of the wizards, sorcerers and witch- doctors.
Their miracles become our spells,
their experiments our rituals.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

If you leave everything to chance,
Chance may leave nothing to you.

Some people change their ways
when they see the light;
Others,
when they feel the heat.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die;
for the harder I work, the more I live.
I rejoice in life for it's own sake.

Life is no brief candle for me.
It is a sort of splendid torch
which I have got hold of for a moment,
and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations.

Thinking is the hardest work there is,
which is probably the reason
why so few people engage in it !

Wisdom can be learnt;
but it can not be taught.

Of God, nothing may be said.
He is beyond the grasp of human thought.
Anything said about Him is true,
not of Him but only of our limited concept of Him.

When a neighborhood forest was devastated by fire
the Master told his disciples:
We must replant it with the cedars.
The disciples pointed out to him
that Cedars would take 200 years to grow.
"In that case, hurry," the Master said,
for there is not a minute to lose.
We must set out at once.

A village blacksmith found an apprentice
willing to work hard for half the minimum wage.
The Smith began his instructions to the lad:
When I take the metal out of the fire, I will lay it on the anvil;
and when I nod my head, hit it with the hammer.
The apprentice did precisely what he thought he had been told.
The next day, he became the village blacksmith!

As knowledge is now delivered,
there is a kind of contract of error
between the deliverer and the receiver.

He that delivereth knowledge
desireth to deliver it in such form
as may be best believed
and not as may be best examined;

And he that receiveth knowledge desireth
rather present satisfaction
than expectant enquiry.

Correction of error
cannot always arise from new discovery
within an accepted conceptual system.
Sometimes, existing theory has to give first,
and a new framework has to be adopted,
before the crucial facts can be seen at all.

Nearly all our life passes in the ordinary way nearly all the time.
Shall we not find fascination
in the earth's daily doings?
How can we hope to understand the rarer moments
that manufacture history's pageant
if we do not recognize and revel
in the pervasive substrate?

The body Of Benjamin Franklin, Printer,
(Like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out
And stripped of its lettering and gilding)
Lies here, food for worms.
But the work shall not be lost
For it will (as he believed) appear once more
In a new and more elegant edition
Revised and corrected by
The Author.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul.
Recognizing that human beings were fallible
and that their failings, though regrettable,
must be humoured,
conscience would permit,
rather ungraciously perhaps,
the indulgence of a number of
carefully selected desires.

Again and again I am brought up against it,
and again and again I resist it:
I don't want to believe it,
even though it is almost palpable:
the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience;
indeed, it often seems to me
that to demand such a thing
is to be in the most populous cities
as solitary as in the desert.

But that's always the way;
it don't make no difference
whether you do right or wrong,
a person's conscience ain't got no sense,
and just goes for him anyway. . . .
It takes up more room
than all the rest of a person's insides,
and yet ain't no good, nohow.
Tom Sawyer thinks the same.

The mere existence of conscience,
that faculty of which
people prate so much nowadays,
and are so ignorantly proud,
is a sign of our imperfect development.
It must be merged in instinct
before we become fine.

Most people sell their souls,
and live with a good conscience on the proceeds!

The quest for certainty
blocks the search for meaning.
Uncertainty is the very condition
to impel man to unfold his powers.

We delight in one knowable thing,
which comprehends all that is knowable;
in one apprehensible,
which draws together all that can be apprehended;
in a single being that includes all
and, above all,
in the one which is itself the all.

In this world
nothing can be said to be certain,
except death and taxes.

I am certain of nothing
but the holiness of the heart's affections,
and the truth of imagination.

The best lack all conviction,
While the worst
are full of passionate intensity.

Mythology, the fine arts, religions of the world, and dreams
provide this priceless imagery by which
the soul's mysteries are simultaneously revealed and contained.

It takes a broad vision to know that
a piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth
lie lodged in the heart of every human being.

It is a beast, this thing that stirs in the core of our being,
but it is also the star of our innermost nature.
We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that,
in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlook the star.
When all your efforts end in failure,
it means that you are being taught the lesson
that, not your own efforts,
but God's Grace alone can bring success.
And you should seek His Grace.

When you come to the edge of all the light you have, and
you must take a step into the darkness of the unknown,
believe that one of two things will happen to you:
Either there will be something solid for you to stand on, or
You will be taught how to fly.

The fire that burns a piece of coal
also covers it and hides it with ash.
Blow the ash away and see the glowing fire within.
The Sun that shines
also causes the clouds which hide it.
When the wind blows and the clouds move away,
We see the sun shining as before.

The Brahman, with His radiance
and eternal Blissful nature,
resides in each one of us.
Avidya, our ignorance
of the true nature of ourselves,
and the veil of Maya
Hide Brahman from our perception.
Faith, Guru and Saadhana (practice)
help us to lift this veil of ignorance and Maya
and live in the state of
eternal Bliss: Sat Chit Ananda.

A cloud does not know why it moves
In just such a direction and speed.
It feels an impulsion:
This is the place to go now.
But the sky knows the reasons
And the patterns behind all clouds,
and you will know, too, when you lift yourself
high enough to see beyond the horizons.

It is easy to condemn evil.
It is difficult to do Good.
If it seems impossible
to imagine seduction as a holy thing,
try to imagine a world without it:
without the lure of travel and exploration,
without the beguiling beauty that entices us
to look at photographs of enchanting places,
without a desire for a rich experience of this life.
Teachers know the importance of presenting ideas
in such a way that they are seductive.

Vanity can feed fashion in a soulful way
and motivate us to bring beauty and care
to our homes and our persons.
Obviously, when Vanity is a symptom
rather than a character trait,
it can render life literally shallow and superficial,
but in that case, the problem is not with vanity itself.
Besides, excessive modesty can be just as narcisstic
and equally unattractive.

All mothering, whether in a family
or within an individual,
is made up of both affectionate caring
and bitter emotional pain.
There is the comforting madonna
and the 'mater dolorosa,' the sorrowful mother.
In both emotions the mother is close to her child,
allowing the child,
even as she feels her pain and anger,
to become an individual
through exposure to experience and to fate.

Since ancient times, in many cultures of the world,
incense, like flowers, has been an integral part of life.
It has long been one of the precious things given as a gift.
Many religions use incense in their ceremonies.
Many scholars and holy people
use incense as part of their contemplations.
The ancients taught that rising smoke
carries our prayers to heaven.
Incense is therefore both an offering and a vehicle.
What a wonderful image:
fragrant smoke carrying our delicate spiritual offerings
into the empyrean sky.

Beauty and devotion are fragile in this life of violent disappointment.
But for the length of time it takes
for a single stick of incense to burn to its stub,
we can put our hearts and minds on what is holy.

One who has lived is always ready to die.
His readiness is not a forced attitude.
His readiness is just like a flower.

When the flower has flowered, has sent its perfume to the infinite corners of existence,
enjoyed the moment, lived it, danced through the breeze, risen against the wind,
looked at the sky, watched the sunrise, lived it,
a fulfillment comes by the evening and the flower is ready to drop to the earth,
to go back, to rest. And it is always beautiful.

When you have lived, rest is beautiful. It is the thing!
The flower simply drops to the earth and goes to sleep.
There is no tension, no anguish, no cry, no effort to cling.
You cling to life because your life is unfulfilled.

The cultured give happiness wherever they go.
The uncultured, whenever they go.

Temper takes you to Trouble,
Pride keeps you there.

Anger befuddles the mind
and leads you to disaster.

Here is a test to find
whether your mission on earth is finished:
If you 're alive, it isn't !

St. Augustine, commenting on the strange way we ignore
the mystery within ourselves, observed:

Men go abroad to wonder at the
Height of the mountains,
Huge waves of the sea,
Long courses of the rivers,
Vast compass of the ocean,
Circular motion of the stars,
And,
they pass by themselves without wondering!

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

	-- Mark Strand
Poet Laureate, 1990-91

BEWARE OF THE LITTLE DEVILS
'No, thanks; I am an addict.'
'Strange that you should reply like that.'
'But you know, addiction is a devil
and I should remember it always.'
'Do you believe in devils? '
'I believe in devils, little ones.
There are very few big ones around on earth; too easy for them.
They send the little fellows here, to get some practice.
Their game is simple; you have to be very careful.
You give in a little and they get you a little.
They are patient; they grab you slowly.
First, you can still make a few decisions,
you can still say No now and then;
But, gradually, they take over.
And when they have you,
They can do anything they like with you.'
'And, where do they take us?'
'To jail, or to a precipice.
They don't have to shove you;
you'll jump by yourself.
You do not even know you are jumping!'

I saw a lucky omen the other day - a white mouse.
But then, the mouse suddenly shook itself and lo,
became an ordinary grey mouse.
It had earlier accidentally fallen into a tin of flour
and the shaking removed
all its coating of the white flour!
Our Zen Master told us:
Don't be like the little white mouse.
If you shake yourself now,
you will be as gray as you were
when you started this course.
Watch it and stay white.
One day, you may really be white.

To the primitive, the world was governed by fate, fact, and necessity.
By stealing fire from the gods, Prometheus turned facts into problems,
called necessity into question, and defied fate.
Classical man framed a civilized context for human perspective.
He was aware that he could defy fate-nature-environment,
but only at his own risk.
Contemporary man goes further;
he attempts to create the world in his own image,
to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers
that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.
We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.

When the day's work is ended,
night brings the blessings of sleep.
So too, death is the ending of a larger day
and, in the night that follows,
every person finds rest until, of his own volition,
he returns to fresh endeavor and to labors anew.
So has it been with this our friend,
so will it be for all of us. Budhist funeral service

To anyone who listened to us, we are prepared to maintain
that death is the necessary outcome of life.
In reality, however, we show an unmistakable tendency
to put death to one side, to eliminate it from life.

The complement to this cultural and conventional attitude towards death
is provided by our complete collapse
when death has struck down someone whom we love.

Death on a grand scale does not bother us.
We can sit around a dinner table and discuss war,
involving sixty million volatilized human deaths,
as though we were talking about bad weather;
we can watch abrupt bloody death every day,
in color, on films and television, without blinking back a tear.
It is when the numbers of dead are very small, and very close,
that we begin to think in scurrying circles.
At the very center of the problem
is the pending naked coldness of one's own self,
the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty,
and it is unmentionable, unthinkable.

How unfortunate!
Love, friendship, respect do not unite people
as much as a common hatred for something.

One cannot resist evil,
but one can resist good.

Culture is restraint.

Chance favors the prepared mind.
The ideal of purified news,
news that registered high in the mind
rather than low in the gonads,
news that told what happened
rather than what might be amusing,
is a small bump in a road
paved with sensational intentions.

Life does not agree with philosophy:
there is no happiness which is not idleness
and only the useless is pleasurable.
Why did Hamlet trouble about ghosts after death,
when life itself is haunted by ghosts
so much more terrible?

If you wish to become an optimist and understand life,
stop believing what others say and write;
observe and discover for yourself.

Bigamy is having one wife too many.
Monogamy is the same.

When we talk to God, we're said to be praying;
When God talks to us, we're either Saints or
Schizophrenics?

When the Gods choose to punish us,
they merely answer our prayers.

We do not count a man's years
until he has nothing else to count.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old,
but that one is young.

Do not go gently into that good night;
Old age should burn and rave at close of day.
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Growing old is no more than a bad habit
which a busy man has no time to form.

Prayer is not asking.
It is a longing of the soul.
It is daily admission of one's weakness.
It is better in prayer to have a heart without words
than words without a heart.

I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it.
I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.

Old Order changeath
Yielding place to new
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. (Tennyson)

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern.
No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.
...Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945)

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air.
You name them - work, family, health, friends and spirit
and you're keeping all of these in the air.
You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball.
If you drop it, it will bounce back.
But the other four balls - family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass.
If you drop one of these,
they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered.
They will never be the same.
You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. How?

* Don't undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others.
It is because we are different that each of us is special.
Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.
Only you know what is best for you.

* Don't take for granted the things closest to your heart.
Cling to them as you would your life,
for without them, life is meaningless.

* Don't let your life slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future.
By living your life one day at a time, you live ALL the days of your life.

* Don't give up when you still have something to give.
Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.

* Don't be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect.
It is this fragile thread that binds us to each other.

* Don't be afraid to encounter risks.
It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.

* Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find.
The quickest way to receive love is to give;
the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly;
and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.

* Don't run through life so fast
that you forget not only where you've been,
but also where you are going.

* Don't forget that a person's greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.

* Don't be afraid to learn.
Knowledge is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.

* Don't use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved.
Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.

* Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery and Today is a gift.
Maybe that's why we call it the Present.

Today I lost myself reading about
a little man named Gandhi Who won battles
a big man named Hannibal Who won battles
Askia, the Great Builder of Timbuctu
Why we sing "John Brown's Body"
Harriet Tubman With $40,000 on her head
Again and again she led Hundreds to Freedom
And the gentle Quakers Who were as strong as iron
I lost myself thinking about them
Then
I found myself
To find
That somewhere
There is something special for me,
To Do, To Be;
I found an important person --
ME

Yesterday is History,
Tomorrow is a Mystery and
Today is a gift.
Maybe that's why we call it the Present.

The Kalpataru tree is a magic tree.
It listens attentively to our every wish and, in due time, grants them all.
Most of our wishes may be very unwise,
but the wishing tree fulfills them all, just the same,
hoping that you will learn by experiencing the consequences.
The gifts that it gives are like the links in a chain.
Each wish is linked to another, and the chain itself holds us in its tight grip.
As we grow, the grip tightens; our wishes increase
and it seems as if we could never wish enough.
Our wishes had been quite simple when we were children,
but steadily they became increasingly complex and more difficult to fulfill.
The Kalpataru had kindled in us a spark of fire by granting our first wish
and this has now grown into a blazing fire
which we do not know how to control or extinguish.

Lost:
Between the hours of Sunrise and Sunset,
Twelve Golden Hours Set with sixty diamond minutes.
No finders:
No rewards.
For alas,
They are lost for ever!

Fools, each lives in his own world.
The Wise, they have a world in common.

From what we get, we can make a living;
what we give, makes life.

The soul would have no rainbows
had the eyes no tears.

All healing requires a movement into soul,
which will be felt outside the familiar structures of serious life.
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox
absence and presence;
its poles -- love and hate, are its motive energies!
We are led profoundly into our soulfulness through the playful turns of life,
and not necessarily or only in weighty matters.

As Heraclitus has said:
Time is a child moving counters in a board game.

At the very first instant of conception
in the mother's womb,
a bundle of coded information was embedded, governing our life;
this included the ageing process as well.
The desire to live for ever and without decay
was born subsequently;
it is not a part of the natural process.

All that thought suggests to me, I can do.
All that that thought reveals in me, I can become.
This should be the unshakable faith in my Self
Because God dwells in me.

God! Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

The tadpole, so long as it has not dropped its tail, lives only in water.
It cannot move about on dry land.
But as soon as it drops its tail, it hops out on the bank;
then it can live both on land and in water.
Likewise,
as long as man has not dropped his tail of ignorance,
he can live only in the water of the world.
But when he drops his tail,
that is to say, when he attains the Knowledge of God,
then he can roam about as a free soul
or live as a householder,
as he likes.

If you want butter,
you must let the milk to turn to curd.
It must be left in a quiet place.
When the milk becomes curd,
you must work hard to churn it.
Only then can you get butter from the milk.

One cannot get true feeling of God
from the study of books.
This feeling is something very different
from book-learning.
Books, scriptures, and science appear
as mere dirt and straw
after the realization of God.

A man born with an element of Siva becomes a jnani;
his mind is always inclined to the feeling
that the world is unreal and Brahman alone is real.
But when a man is born with an element of Vishnu,
he develops ecstatic love of God.
That love can never be destroyed.
It may wane a little now and then
when he indulges in philosophical reasoning,
but it ultimately returns to him increased a thousand-fold.

When Nations grow old,
the Arts grow cold, and
commerce settles on every tree.

Aging brings out the flavors of a personality.
The individual emerges over time,
the way fruit matures and ripens.
In the Renaissance view, depression, aging,
and individuality all go together:
the sadness of growing old
is part of becoming an individual.
Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take residence.

No wealth brings greater return
than intelligence, and
No aloneness is more desolate than vanity...

How do we discover our purpose?
If we listen carefully, we will hear or sense
a voice inside ourselves.
It's the voice of our inner teacher.
We must train ourselves to listen to it.
Amidst all the din of the other voices in there,
the inner teacher reminds us constantly:
   "I am here, very close to you.
    I'm your friend and I love you.
    If you listen to me, I can guide you."
We have to listen to this teacher
if we want to lead a purposeful life.

What Special Someday Are We Saving For?
My brother-in-law opened the bottom drawer of my sister's bureau
and lifted out a tissue-wrapped package.
This, he said, is not a slip. This is lingerie.
He discarded the tissue and handed me the slip.
It was exquisite silk, handmade and trimmed with a cobweb of lace.
The price tag with an astronomical figure on it was still attached.
Jan bought this the first time we went to New York,
at least eight or nine years ago. She never wore it.
She was saving it for a special occasion.
Well, I guess this is the occasion.
He took the slip from me and put it on the bed with the other clothes we were taking to the
mortician. His hands lingered on the soft material for a moment.
Then he slammed the drawer shut and turned to me.
"Don't ever save anything for a special occasion.
Every day you're alive is a special occasion."

I remembered those words through the funeral and the days that followed when I helped him
and my niece attend to all the sad chores that follow an unexpected death. I thought about
them on the plane returning to California from the Midwestern town where my sister's family
lives. I thought about all the things that she hadn't seen or heard or done.
I thought about the things that she had done without realizing that they were special.
I'm still thinking about his words, and they've changed my life.
I'm reading more and dusting less. I'm sitting on the deck and admiring the view without
fussing about the weeds in the garden. I'm spending more time with my family and friends
and less time in committee meetings.

Whenever possible, life should be a pattern of experiences to savor, not endure.
I'm trying to recognize these moments now and cherish them.
I'm not saving anything; we use our good china and crystal for every special event such as
losing a pound, getting the sink unstopped, the first camellia blossom. I wear my good blazer
to the market if I feel like it. My theory is if I look prosperous, I can shell out $28.49 for a
small bag of groceries without wincing.
I'm not saving my good perfume for special parties; clerks in hardware stores and tellers in
banks have noses that function as well as my party-going friends.
Someday and one of these days are fighting a losing battle to stay in my vocabulary. If it's
worth seeing or hearing or doing, I want to see and hear and do it now. I'm not sure what
my sister would have done had she known that she wouldn't be here for the tomorrow we
all take for granted. I think she would have called family members and a few close friends.
She might have called a few former friends to apologize and mend fences for past squabbles.
I like to think she would have gone out for a Chinese dinner, her favorite food.
I'm guessing I'll never know.

It's those little things left undone that would make me angry if I knew that my hours were
limited. Angry because I put off seeing good friends whom I was going to get in touch with
someday. Angry because I hadn't written certain letters that I intended to write one of these
days. Angry and sorry that I didn't tell my husband and daughter often enough how much I
truly love them.

I'm trying very hard not to put off, hold back or save anything that would add laughter and
luster to our lives. And every morning when I open my eyes I tell myself that this is a special
occasion.

This 1985 Newspaper Essay, Popularized on the Internet, comes full circle. Ann Wells' work somehow made its way to the Internet,
where it moved by e-mail and chain letters, compliments of the forward button, and has been renamed A Story to Live By.
Wells, a retired secretary and occasional freelancer, was stunned that the essay, first published in The Times in April 1985,
has been zipping through cyberspace. She doesn't even have e-mail. I'm as surprised as anyone, Wells said.

Escape is everywhere whether we move from the jangling chords of civilization back to a
serenely pastoral nature, or from that same nature now experienced as hostile and forbidding
to the covers of our warm beds in our well-constructed homes. In fact, so pervasive is flight
that Tuan proffers a rather startling definition of culture:

The totality of means by which I escape
from my animal state of being.

Why are we continually in flight? Well, we flee our bodies because of their embarrassing
demands for food, elimination, sex. And we flee from our very selves into the social crowd
because, as the author notes, uniqueness, however cherished, can at times be quite intolerable.
Once we have fled, however, we grow disenchanted and escape in the other direction away
from wispy thought back to the ponderous body; away from the suffocating crowd back to
solitude. So inescapable are these flights that Tuan offers one more definition of the human
species: an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.
His thesis, however, is clear. Escapes, those imaginative reconstructions of reality, are
indispensable. While flights from our animal selves can be silly, preposterous, even cruel and
dangerous, they can also create new and more expressive ways for humans to flourish.
While romantic love, for example, may have originated in a flight from our more bestial
selves, it has become over time just as real and decidedly more human than mere animal
couplings.

For Tuan, it is the power of imagination that serves as the mechanism of escape, and he
pursues it down its labyrinthine ways, noting both its destructive and creative impulses.
Because of its enormous power, imagination must be checked by the moral weight of the
good and that, finally, is where his study culminates, on moral grounds that are provided for
by his Western (Greek) and Eastern (Confucian) heritages. He is most at home in the
proverbial middle way; in fact, his favorite metaphor for an ethical escape is landscape,
both as nature and artifice. More particularly, middle landscapes Chinese gardens and
cultivated fields -- serve as the geographical analogue for our moral center; for Tuan they
open up a world that is both at home and in tension with nature. In these middle landscapes,
we are neither angels nor beasts, neither Icarus nor Caliban, but mortals anchored in the
earth, yet borne aloft on the wings of imagination. I only wish that Tuan had argued more
strenuously for these last moral considerations, so sound and yet in such disrepute today.

When asked about the greatest satisfaction
that a life like hers has brought upon her,
MS Subbulakshmi did not answer for a while; she remained silent.
Then she said hesitantly at first, and then with more conviction:
"Each of us has a gift. We use it to the best of our abilities.
That is nothing wonderful..........What gives me satisfaction?...
Well, I have never wished anyone I have known any harm.
Perhaps, that has been my only real achievement."

Do what you can with what you have, where you are.

The morning wind spreads its fresh smell
We must go up and take that in --
that wind that lets us live, breathe
Before it's gone.
Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor.
For, a subject which will not bear raillery
is suspicious, and
a jest which will not bear a serious examination
is certainly false wit.

The great use of life is
to spend it for something that will outlast it.
A foolish man, learning that the Budha observed the principles of love
and of returning good for evil,came and abused him, wanting to provoke him.
When the man had finished his abuse,
the Budha asked him:
"Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?"
And he answered, "To the man who offered it."
The Budha then told him, "My son, I decline to accept your abuse."

The Budha said:
"A wicked man who abuses a virtuous one
is like one who looks up and spits at heaven;
the spittle does not soil heaven
but comes back and defiles his own person."

When Swami Vivekananda passed through the Indian native state of Alwar in Rajasthan,
the Maharajah of the place was attracted to him. Having no faith in image worship, he said
to the Swamiji: "I cannot worship wood, earth, stone or metal like other people. What will
happen to me?"
Swamiji made no reply. He looked up at a picture on the wall and asked, "Whose picture
is that?" The Dewan, who was present replied, "Don't you see Swamiji, it is the likeness of
the Maharajah?"
Swamiji had the picture taken down and then he said to the Dewan, "Spit on it."
The Dewan shrank back in fear. Swamiji then told the Maharajah:
"Look at the regard that your Dewan has for this piece of paper. He looks upon it with as
much respect as your person. Thus it is with those who worship stone and metal images.
They do not worship the stone or metal as such.
God appears to all according to their understanding of him."

One day the Budha went with his begging bowl to a farmer. The farmer looked displeased
and said roughly: "I have ploughed my field, sowed the seed and gathered the grain, but you
have done no work to earn your bread."

The Budha replied: "I too have earned my bread."
The farmer rejoined: "Then where is your plough and where are your oxen?"

The Budha said:
"The seed I sow is faith, the rain that waters the seed is repentance, wisdom is my plough
and yoke, the oxen that draw the plough are diligence; with truth, I cut away the weeds of
sin and ignorance; my harvest is the fruit of immortality."
To know what is impenetrable to us really exists,
manifesting itself as the highest wisdom
and the most radiant beauty...
this knowledge, this feeling
is at the center of true religiousness.

A faith to live by,
a self to live with, and
a purpose to live for.

The root of being uptight is our unwillingness to accept life
as being different, in any way, from our expectations.
Very simply, we want things to be a certain way
but they're not a certain way. Life is simply as it is.

Perhaps Benjamin Franklin said it best:
"Our limited perspective, our hopes and fears become our measure of life,
and when circumstances don't fit our ideas, they become our difficulties"

Beware of words.
The moment you look away,
they will take a life of their own.
They will dazzle, mesmerize, terrorize
and lead you astray from the reality
they merely represent,
and lead you to believe that they are real.
The world you see is but a fragmented one,
broken into a thousand pieces by the word.
It is as if each ocean wave were seen to be disparate
and separate from the body of the ocean.
When words and thoughts are silenced,
the Universe blooms forth real,
and whole, and one;
Words become
what they were always meant to be:
   the score, not the music;
   the menu, not the food;
   the signpost, not the journey's end.
The language of the divine is silence.

God does not cease to exist
because we cease to believe in a personal deity.
But we die the day
when our lives cease to be illumined
by the radiance, the wonder --
the source of which is beyond all reason.

To be wronged is nothing,
unless you insist on remembering it.
When someone offends you,
raise your spirits to heights
where offenses cannot reach.

The atheists make the mistake of denying
that of which nothing may be said;
the theists, of affirming it.

Art is found in a museum
but beauty is everywhere.
The idol we worship is in the temple,
but spirituality is everywhere.
Ten-headed Ravana: -
not even one head had sense for Dharma.
Dasamukha Ravana fell due to Kama for Seetha.

Dasa'ratha, king of Ayodhya, could ride ten chariots.
But he could not control
his own ten karmendriyas and Gnanendriyas.
He failed due to Kama for Kaikeyi.

If we had known grand-kids were so much fun,
We'd have had them first!

Luck may bring you riches,
but never wisdom.

Promise only what you can deliver.
Then, deliver more than you promised.

Praise may be satisfying to receive;
but it never teaches you anything new.

Do not try to drown your sorrows;
they know how to swim.

True wealth is what you are --
not what you have.
Too many of us are spending money
that we haven't earned,
to buy things we don't need,
to impress people we don't like.

Remember:
the big print giveth and
the small print taketh away.

A friend is a person
who knows all about you
but likes you anyway.

I have never seen a smiling face
that was not beautiful.

Want to change every thing around you?
Just change your attitude.

By swallowing evil words unsaid,
no one has ever harmed his stomach.

Criticism never built a house,
painted a picture
or improved a marriage.

The person who pursues revenge
should dig two graves.

Don't brag.
It's not the whistle that moves the train.

I have cancer
but cancer does not have me.

I am as broke as the ten commandments!

You may be smarter than other people;
just don't tell them so.

How else,
except through a broken heart,
may God enter?

May the peace of God
disturb you always.

Speak of the truth with those who search for it,
and of knowledge to those
who have commited a sin in their error.
Make firm the foot of those who have stumbled,
give rest to those who are weary,
raise up those who wish to rise, and
awaken those who sleep .

You want out
You want escape
You want relief
You meditate to block out life
You chant to put the world on hold
You pray to get what you want
Ram Tzu knows this...
Your noble search for God is but a sly dodge.

On the Human Brain:
We cannot bypass this central focus and filter,
this magnificent device crammed full of biases
both evolutionarily encoded
and socially constructed.

Objectivity lies in the flexibility
to reject a cherished theory
when an anticipated observation cannot be affirmed,
and a perception of contrary meaning delights us, instead.

With the erosion of the community,
people are spending more and more time alone
and enjoying it less.
To be sure, we value our privacy,
but being truly alone with ourselves
is something different,
something that unfortunately inspires unease,
if not fear.

In our solitary moments,
the vigilant forces of socialization let down their guard
and the forbidden threatens to surface.
And then we become prey
to our feelings of the inadequacy
and meaninglessness of our lives,
or destructive thoughts of revenge.
No wonder, then, that many people work hard
to avoid being alone,
anesthetizing their minds
with the constant rumble of media noise.
Radio, television, movies, books
all distract them from being alone,
from reflecting on who they are,
where they are going and why.

A longing for solitude can grow out of fear, flight from self
or from a need to discover the true self in one.
Whether we experience our time-when-alone negatively as loneliness
or positively as solitude
depends on whether we view it as a product of free choice.
Our internal dialogue is intimately bound up
with our beliefs about `aloneness' and what meanings we attach to it.

Loneliness results not only from lack of choice
but also from not knowing how to occupy ourselves when alone.
Time can seem to stretch out endlessly like the monotonous tick-tocking of a clock, without meaning or purpose.

The beginning is the most important part of a work.

Everyone who is being overtaken by death
asks for more time,
while everyone who still has time
makes excuses for procrastination

The mad mind does not halt.
If it halts, it is enlightenment.

Mythology is an integral part of religion.
It is necessary for religion and national culture
as the skin and skeleton that preserve a fruit with its juice and taste.
We cannot squeeze religion
and hope to bottle and keep the essence by itself.
It would neither be very useful nor last very long.
Mythology and holy figures are necessary
for any great culture to rest on its stable foundation
and function as a life-giving inspiration and guide.

With his dying breath,
Vaali reproached Rama of perfidy in dealing causeless death
to a person engaged in combat with another.
Valmiki has it that Rama gave some explanation with which Vaali was satisfied.
But I am omitting all this as pointless..
What I think is that an avataar is an avataar
and that among the sorrows that the Lord and his consort
had to endure in their earthly incarnation, this liability
to have their actions weighed on the earthly scales is a part.
(p.189, Ramayana, Bhavan's book by Rajaji).

Let no one look upon work as a burden.
Good work is the secret that keeps life going.
While one should not hanker after results,
life without work would be unendurable.
(Concluding remarks of Rajaji in his Ramayana)

I have followed the story
of the Prince of Ayodhya as told by Valmeeki.
There was a legend current among people, I think, even before Valmeeki's time,
that after recovering Seeta, for fear of scandal, Rama sent her away to live in the forest.
This pathetic episode must have sprung from the sorrow-laden imagination of our women.
It has taken shape as the Uttarakaanda of Ramayana.
Although there is beauty in the Uttarakaanda I must say that my heart rebels against it.
Valmeeki had disposed of this old legend through the fire ordeal in the battle field.
Even the ordeal does not seem to me as consistent with Rama's character. It is painful to
read it.
As the Prince returned from Mithila he met Parasurama. I have heard it said that with that
meeting Parasurama's avataar came to an end.
Likewise, it should be held, I think, that Rama's avataar came to an end with the slaying of
Ravana. After that battle, Raama remained only as a king of the Ikshvaaku race. On this
theory. Raama's treatment of Seeta after the battle and in the Uttarakaanda can be explained
simply as the behaviour of a king in accordance with the custom of the times.

Truth is one. Wise people call it by various names.
Vedam: Ekam sath viprah bahudhah vadanti

In a lengthy article titled ``Neither a saint nor a politician'' published in 'Young India' on
May 12, 1920, Mahatma Gandhi said:

   "the politician in me has never dominated a single decision of mine, and if I seem to take part
    in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which
    one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the
    snake...''

First, rub your hands with oil
if you wish to break open the jack-fruit.
Otherwise, the milky exudation will stick to your hands.

First anoint your hands with the oil of devotion (Bhakti),
and then deal with the affairs of the world.

When, through the practice of yoga,
the mind ceases its restless movements and becomes still,
the Yogi realises the Atman and revels in it.
He then knows that infinite happiness
which can be realised by the purified heart
but which is beyond the grasp of the senses.

Rooted in this realisation,
he never again wavers from the truth of his Being. (VI:20-21)

Now that he has realised it, he knows this treasure is above all others:
Rooted in such faith, he shall never be shaken by heaviest sorrow (VI:22)
Released from evil, his mind is constant in contemplation.
The way is easy. Brahman has touched him.
That Bliss is boundless. (VI:28)

He who knows not
And knows not that he knows not,
Is a Fool --- Shun him.
He who knows not
And knows that he knows not,
Is ignorant --- Teach him.
He who knows
And does not know that he knows,
Is Asleep --- Awaken him.
But he who knows
And knows that he knows,
Is Wise
Follow him.

It is a tiny little key
that unlocks the wisdom
that He has endowed you with
for dealing with problems.

When you are in need,
search for that little key;
you shall find it
in the silence
deep within your heart.

In this battle of life,
We are not pitted against each other;
We are pitted against ourselves.
Our victories are almost always
the ones we forge alone.

The word Zen is a Japanese mispronunciation of the chinese word CH'AN,
which, in turn, is a chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit word DHYANA, meaning
`contemplation, meditation.

The leading aim of all Oriental mystic teaching might be described as that of enabling us to
shift our focus of self-identification from, so to say, the light bulb to the light, from the mortal
person to the consciousness of which our bodies are but vehicles.
That in fact is the whole sense of the famous saying
in the Indian Chandogya Upanishad:
`Tat Twam Asi'
`That thou art'
`You yourself are that undifferentiated universal ground of all being, all consciousness, and
all bliss.'

Not, however, the `you' with which one normally identifies the `you,'
that is to say, that has been named, numbered, and computerized.
That is NOT the `you' that is THAT;
for, that `you' is the condition that makes you a separate bulb.
It is not easy, however, to shift the accent of one's sense of being
from the body to its consciousness,
and from this consciousness then, to consciousness altogether.

The first and foremost aim of Zen is to break the net of our concepts -
which is why it has been termed by some a philosophy of `no mind.'
A number of schools of Occidental psychological therapy hold
that what we all most need and are seeking is a meaning for our lives.
For some, this may be a help; but all it helps is the intellect,
and when the intellect sets to work on life with its names and categories,
recognitions and relationships and definitions of meaning,
what is inwardmost is readily lost.
Zen holds to the realization
that life and the sense of life are antecedent to meaning;
the idea being to let life come and not name it.
It will then push you right back to where you live -
where you are, and not where you are named.

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.

Worrying about things no one else worries about
is where insights come from.

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits -
and then re-mold it
nearer to the Heart's Desire!
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

You can't avoid criticism; for,
to do so, you may have to do nothing,
say nothing and,
Be nothing!

History is not an account of what happened
but of what people think happened.

His (Hugo's) posterity
is like a great river running into the sea;
Hugo himself has dissolved, his life shrouded in myth,
his books perhaps more cited than actually read.

The author of the biography, Graham Robb
is alive to Hugo's glaring faults --
the mytho-mania, the garrulity
(never one word where three will do) --
but he responds fully
to the visionary poet and novelist,
not the angelic romantic but the Gargantuan figure
whose forests of words grow richly
out of the sewers of Paris,
which are so memorably painted in ''Les Miserables.''

My grandfather
was one of those respectable bourgeois
who never change their home or their views.

Mother's milk, by divine dispensation,
is shared equally,
but that each child receives it all:
the ideal, miraculous solution to sibling rivalry.

Nothing endures but change.
Let your actions always be rooted
in the knowledge you have gathered.

Do not be like the donkey
that carries a load of sandal wood.
It knows only the weight of the load,
but not its fragrance.

We eventually learn
that spirituality is not about leaving life's problems behind,
but about continually confronting them
with honesty and courage.
It is about ending our feeling of separation from others
by healing our relationships with parents,
co-workers, and friends.
It is about bringing heightened awareness
and compassion to our family life, careers,
and community service.

Well, If I called the wrong number,
why did you answer the phone?

Concluding remarks by the reviewer, Francis I. Kane who teaches philosophy at Salisbury
State University in Maryland. (His most recent book is Neither Beasts Nor Gods: Civic Life
and the Public Good.)

In the end, I confess that even after all that looking, I was not persuaded that all culture is
escape. The very same moral considerations the author points to would, I think, require that
we discriminate between mere escape and authentic liberation.
Two older books responded to these questions rather more directly: a scholarly work,
Leisure: The Basis of Culture, by the philosopher Josef Pieper, and a more popular book,
The Decline of Pleasure, by Walter Kerr, theater critic for The New York Herald Tribune
and later for The Times.
Both authors admirably distinguish between escapes that afford authentic leisure and genuine
pleasure reading a good book, for example and those mere diversions that simply distract us
from our workaday world, like building a garage on our day off. Both of these books
generously employ another defining human characteristic, not developed nearly enough in
Tuan's otherwise praise worthy book: the capacity to judge. If we are going to look in the
right direction, we will have to do more than look. We will have to assess, evaluate and
discriminate. There is no escaping that.

Life's work is not machine-work
obsessed with control -- negating the Mystery of Life.
It is an integrated expression of Being and doing,
what Zen calls the "infinite way of doing finite things."
It is a celebration of the Mystery of Life.

We needn't be desperate prisoners of the time machine,
struggling to lord it over our separate little kingdoms.
We can live in cognizance of the Eternal
and in harmony with life, nature, and one another.
We can dedicate ourselves to loving and serving our fellow-beings
in the realization that we are all a part of the great eternity of existence. Laurence Boldt

A certain famous Fakir was claiming in the village
that he could teach an illiterate person to read by a lightining technique.
Nasrudin stepped out of the crowd and said: Very well, teach me now.
The Fakir touched the Mulla's forehead and said,
Now go home immediately and read a book.
Half an hour later Nasrudin was back in the market-place, clutching a book.
The Fakir had gone on his way.
Can you read now, Mulla? the people asked him.
Yes, I can read - but that is not the point. Where is that charlatan?
How can he be a charlatan if he has caused you to read without learning?
Because this book, which is authoritative, says,
All Fakirs are frauds!

CARAVAN OF DREAMS, Idries Shah
Some people think they should work without receiving payment.
Others like to barter their services,
with the intention of avoiding money's shadow.
But poverty, like wealth can be taken too literally,
so that the person escaping money stands lonely outside the community
that economics helps to sustain.
The desire for wealth, a legitimate element in the soul's eros
may be lost along with its joy;
or it is repressed and then sneaks back in awkwardness about money,
or in behind-the-scenes financial wizardy and hoarding.
When the soul of money is denied, it takes on an added measure of shadow.
We have to distinguish between the shadow qualities of money
that are part of its soulfulness and
the symptoms of money gone berserk.
Greed, avarice, cheating, embezzlement
are signs that the soul of money has been lost.
We act out the need for wealth of the soul through its fetish,
gathering actual sums of money without regard for morality,
rather than entering the communal exchange of money.

It is the nature of money to be exchanged.
Profit and consumption are like breathing in and out. Money is the medium for that vital
action in the body of society. When money no longer serves community-exchange, it
becomes an obstacle to the communal flow. Scheming and greedy manipulation interfere
with the natural rhythm of exchange.

Ideally, money corrupts us all not literally, but in the alchemical sense. It darkens innocence
and continually initiates us into hand-to-hand combat in the sacred warfare of life. It takes us out of innocent idealism and brings us into the deeper, more soulful places where power, prestige and
self-worth are hammered out through substantial involvement in the making of culture.
Therefore, money can give grounding and grit to a soul that otherwise might fade in the soft
pastels of innocence.

Live morality before you talk of it.
Practise meditation before you preach it.
Taste goodness before you recommend it.
Gain bliss before you offer it to others.
He who knows others
is wise;
He who knows himself,
is enlightened.

You have experienced being in the flow;
You have known moments of profound effortlessness:
The golf club seemed to swing itself.
The poem leapt onto the page.
The exact right word flew from our lips.
The solution to the problem just appeared.
In these moments there was no doubt;
All questions vanished.
Time changed shape or evaporated;
You disappeared.
But always, your ego reasserted itself
and claimed the experience as its own.
Believing you had done something,
You set out to do it again --
You developed techniques, therapies, religions.

Ram Tzu has a question for you?
What force makes you believe
YOU can manufacture Grace?

A rich man's maid-servant will do all her duties,
but her thoughts are always set upon her own home.
Her master's house is not hers.
She will, indeed, nurse her master's children as if they were her own,
saying often: `My own Rama', `My own Hari'.
But all the while she knows full well the children are not hers.
The tortoise moves about in the water in quest of food;
where do you think her mind abides?
On the bank of the river, to be sure -- where her eggs are laid.
In the same way you may go about doing your work in the world,
but take good care that your mind always rests at the Hallowed Feet of the Lord.

There is nothing to be healed,
Only God to be revealed!

Never again say you are divorced!
From now on say you are willing and available to experience a _relationship.

Everytime you think or say you are divorced/separated/ alone/by yourself,
you create more of that experience.

Never again say you are broke! You are temporarily low on cash or are out of cash!
Words create experience.
When you say broke, the universe doesn't know you are referring to money, so it brings
broke to you broken heart, broken life, broken spirit.
Never again say struggle. Life is an Act of Faith! --Struggle is optional!
Your saving grace is the disappearance of urgency it causes wrinkles and fat!
Be gentle with yourself. Be patient with yourself.
Begin your search for love and life within.

I'm not obsessed.
I'm severely interested in a compulsive way.

Don't take things too hard.
Fate tends to prefer untangled threads in the end,
so things work out usually.
It's just hard going,
as the knots are being pulled.

One does not achieve inner discipline
Until one reaches the extremes of art and life.

When you come
to the edge of all the light you have,
and you must take a step
into the darkness of the unknown,
Believe that one of two things will happen to you:
Either there will be
something solid for you to stand on, or
You will be taught how to fly.

Childhood is nature unconscious;
Buddhahood is nature conscious.

Childhood is a circumference with no idea of the center.
Buddhahood is also a circumference, but rooted in the center, centered.

Childhood is unconscious anonymity;
Buddhahood is conscious anonymity.

Both are nameless, both are formless...
but the child has not known the form yet,
and the misery of it.

Keep your hands open,
and all the sands of the desert can pass through them.
Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit.

The heart has it's reasons,
of which reason knows nothing.

Just think,
if it weren't for marriage,
men would go through life thinking
they had no faults at all.

I was married by a judge.
I should have asked for a jury.

May you live all the days of your life.

As long as you live,
keep learning how to live.

It is in your moments of decision
that your destiny is shaped.

We have been told that we must face the facts of life;
but we must also, if we are really going to live,
face the spirit and the emotional power of life.
To describe Michelangelo's 'David'
as a marble statue of a Hebrew king in his youth
gives you the facts,
but none of the spirit or emotional power of the work.
It is no less ridiculous to reduce your life to a set of facts.
You are not your name,
place of birth, your degrees, your resume, or credit history.
You are a being of spirit, emotional power, and intelligence.
To have inward beauty, there must be complete abandonment;
the sense of not being held, of no restraint, no defense, no resistance;
but abandonment becomes chaotic if there is no austerity with it.
And do we know what it means to be austere, to be satisfied with little
and not to think in terms of 'more'?
There must be this abandonment with deep inward austerity --
the austerity that is extraordinarily simple
because the mind is not acquiring, gaining, not thinking in terms of 'the more'.
It is the simplicity born of abandonment with austerity
that brings about the state of creative beauty.
But if there is no love, you cannot be simple, you cannot be austere.
You may talk about simplicity and austerity,
but without love they are merely a form of compulsion,
and therefore there is no abandonment.
Beauty obviously includes beauty of form;
but without inward beauty,
the mere sensual appreciation of beauty of form
leads to degradation, disintegration.

If it weren't for the last minute,
nothing would get done!

Who says the eternal being does not exist?
Who says the sun has gone out?
Someone who climbs up on the roof
and closes his eyes tight,
and says, I don't see anything.

To develop patience you need someone who wilfully hurts you.
Such people afford you an opportunity to practise tolerance.
They test our inner strength in a way that even our Guru cannot.

One day Mullah Nasruddin entered his favorite teahouse and said:
'The moon is more useful than the sun'.
An old man asked: 'Why Mulla?'
Nasruddin replied:
'We need the light more during the night than during the day.'

A friend asked Mulla Nasruddin:
'How old are you?'
'Forty', replied the Mullah.
The friend said:
'but you said the samething two years ago.'
'Yes,' replied the Mullah,
'I always stand by what I have said!'

Once a one-legged dragon named Hui asked a centipede,
How do you manage all those legs? I can hardly manage one!
As a matter of fact, answered the centipede, I do not manage them.
The centipede that doesn't trust nature can hardly walk;
The human being who doesn't trust nature can hardly live his own life.

Creativity bubbles up from within when we open to trust,
what the Taoist calls our original nature.

Charisma knows only inner determination and inner restraint...
The charismatic leader gains and maintains authority
Soley by proving his strength in life.
In his village Mulla Nasruddin was the only man who could write,
so people used to come to him to write a letter or some document.
One day, Nasruddin wrote a letter, that a man man dictated;
it was a long letter; and the man said: Please, now read it to me,
because I want to be sure that I have not forgotten anything,
and you have not messed up anything.

Mulla said: Now, this is difficult.
I know how to write but I don't know how to read.
And moreover, the letter is not addressed to me,
so it will be illegal for me to read it.

Never try to imitate anybody,
never be an imitator;
That is suicide.
Then you will never be able to enjoy.
You will always remain a carbon copy,
you will never be the original.
And all that happens in life
truth, beauty, good, liberation, meditation, love
happens to the original,
never to the carbon copy.

Much learning
Does not teach understanding.

I am a great and sublime fool.
But then I am God's fool and
All his works must be contemplated with respect.

Everybody wants to be somebody
Till they are nobody!

I cannot believe that
the inscrutable universe
turns on an axis of suffering.
Surely, the strange beauty of the world
must somewhere rest on pure joy!
Rare indeed it is to find a friend
who will give us, in times of distress
Advice that is not pleasing,
yet is the best one for our good,
like the bitter medicine that cures an illness.

A successful man is one
who can lay a firm foundation
with the bricks that others throw at him.

There is no limit to the measure of sacrifice that one may make
in order to realize 'oneness with all life",
but certainly that ideal will set a limit to your wants.
That is the antithesis of the position of modern civilization
which says, "Increase your wants."
In his cryptic way,
my father could gift-wrap the most painful experiences
in a ribbon of philosophy.

He said:
This is the secret to happiness:
Make your Vocation your Avocation.
The day you find
the courage to do for a living
What you would do for a fun,
The bullies of life --
fear, failure, doubt, dread
Will melt away.

The secret to happiness:
Make your Vocation your Avocation.

The day you find
the courage to do for a living
What you would do for a fun
The bullies of life --
fear, failure, doubt, dread
Will melt away.

In his autobiography, "My Confessions",
St.Augustine struggles with the mystery of existence and asks in Book I,
"Was there nothing before
except the life I lived in my mother's womb?
But then, my God, my sweetness,
what came before that?
Was I somewhere else?
Was I even someone?
I have nobody to tell me."

St. Augustine saw Prayer
as a form of thinking;
a way of seeking Truth,
not a pious form of wishing.

No one can call upon God without knowing Him.
St. Augustine wonders:

"May it be that a man must implore You before he can know You?"
The only things to count on are longing and the occult directives of desire.
Does this mean that prayer must come before faith?
Perhaps, not knowing is the first condition of prayer. Can that be?
Augustine finds his working answer in Scripture:

"How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?
They shall praise the Lord that seek him."

Longing is the only sure knowledge, that core of human instinct
which unfurls its song of praise.

In the middle of the journey our life,
I came to myself within a dark wood -
Where the straight way was lost.

People are like stained glass windows;
they sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
but when the darkness sets in,
their true beauty is revealed
only if there is a light from within.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare.
It is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

This is the hardest of all:
to close the open hand out of love,
and keep modest as a giver.

The real in us is silent,
the acquired, talkative

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.

There is no reality, only perception.
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.
We fell them down and turn them into paper
that we may record our emptiness.

Art curator and philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy said,
"It is taken for granted that
while at work we are doing what we like least,
and at play what we should wish to be doing all the time."
Conceiving of ourselves as artists
in whatever work we do gives us a metaphor
for a life of integrity, service, enjoyment, and excellence.
It is not that we all take dance classes and are suddenly "dancers"
or that we take creative writing classes and are now "poets".
It is rather that in whatever our craft,
we lift ourselves to the highest standards of excellence in that field.
Human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and
each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword
were used to slice rotten meat. It's like a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when
one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It's like a knife of the finest
tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.

You say, "But look, I'm using the dagger. It's not lying idle". Do you hear how ludicrous that
sounds? For a penny, an iron nail could be bought to serve the purpose. You say, "But I
spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and
astronomy and medicine and all of the rest." But consider why you do those things. They are
all branches of yourself.

Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your Lord. Give your life to the one
who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don't, you will be exactly like the
man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his
dipper gourd. You'll be wasting valuable keenness and foolishly ignoring our dignity and
your purpose.

If all we judge only on appearances,
every devil will be thought a saint,
and every superior man an enemy of humanity.

When speech can lead to
the remorseless disposal of other people's lives,
Silence is not a negative attitude.

Behold, I have refined thee,
but not with silver;
I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction.

The only difference between adults and children
Is the cost of their toys.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp.

The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide
that you are not going to stay where you are.

The words printed here are concepts.
You must go through the experiences.

The Hero is the chooser at the crossroads of life.
He exercises the judgment that selects what is worthy of his or her time, attention, and
energy..
"To choose a life direction", is the Hero's greatest choice.
His life is never random or automatic (even if intuition is his guide).
He chooses to be conscious of the choices he makes and accepts fullness.
He knows that the greater the awareness, the better the choices he will make.
The Hero as chooser is the one who decides
what to create, to build, to make.
The Hero is the inner king or queen setting the agenda for the other creative powers,
Commanding them to work his visions into reality.
In relation to the other archetypes, he is the first among equals.
We cannot be artists of life without the courage to seek
and the courage to stand by our insights.
Likewise the Magician, the Warrior, and the Scholar
all serve life directions set forth by the Hero.
The 'shadow hero' is the nowhere man,
without conscience, direction, or personal integrity.
The Hero is decided, and the first decision is to live, to say yes to life.
The nowhere man is indecisive.
He doesn't know who he is, what he wants, or where he is going.
He thinks ,"It's a beautiful day, someone paid me a compliment,
it's payday. I like to live. Life is good.
But the next day, it's raining,
he feels his aches and pains a little more acutely,
the dog does doo on his morning newspaper, and the boss is upset.
so he thinks,
"I hate life, it's a terrible thing that I've been forced to endure.
His days go on like this a virtual roller coaster of elation and depression.
That's why he's called the nowhere man.

"THE ESSENTIAL RUMI", translated by Coleman Barks
UNFOLD YOUR OWN MYTH
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age, smells the shirt of his lost son and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up a flowing prophet?
Or like Moses goes for fire and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Solomon cuts open a fish, and there's a gold ring
Omar storms in to kill the prophet and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop, now there's a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins. Suddenly he's wealthy.

But don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others.
Unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage, "We have opened you"
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you've grown, lifting.

The hero must venture forth from the world of commonsense consciousness
into a region of supernatural wonder.
There he encounters fabulous forces: dragons and helping spirits.
After a fierce battle, he wins a decisive victory over the powers of darkness.
Then he returns from his mysterious adventure
with the gift of knowledge or fire,
which he bestows on his fellow man

The buyer needs a thousand eyes,
the seller not one.

How can I become still?
By flowing with the stream.
Buddha's last sermon:

It is not appropriate to grieve in an hour of joy....
you all weep, but is there any cause for grief?
We should look upon a sage as a person escaped from a burning mansion...
it does not matter if I am here or not;
Salvation does not depend upon me but on practicing the Dharma,
just as a cure depends not upon seeing the doctor but upon taking his medicine..

My time has come, my work is done...
Everything eventually comes to an end, even if it should last for an eon.
the time of parting is bound to come one day. I have done what I could for myself and others,
and to remain longer would be without purpose. I have trained all whom I could train. My
teachings shall last for many generations, so do not be disturbed. Recognize that all that lives
is subject to the laws of impermanence, and strive for eternal wisdom.

When the light of knowledge dispels ignorance, when the world is seen as without substance,
the end of life is seen as peace and as a cure to a disease. Everything that exists is bound to
perish. Be therefore mindful of your salvation. The time of my passing has come."

(With these words the Buddha entered into a profound meditation and passed away. The
earth shook like a ship in a storm; thunder and lightning filled the heavens.)

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

From the northern hemisphere of earth,
the Milky Way is seen usually on a clear summer night
stretching across the sky from north to south.
The brilliant stars of the constellations Cygnus, Sagittarius and Scorpius
gleam in the star-studded stream
Which ancient observers named the Milky Way
because they thought that perhaps their gods had spilled milk on the heavens.

Astronomically speaking, as the popular NBC sitcom says,
"We're the 3rd Rock From The Sun."
One of nine planets orbiting a rather ordinary star,
what makes this particular star special is that it's "3rd rock" is the only one known to have life.

This rock and its parent star are in a galaxy called the Milky Way,
one of some 50 billion in the universe.

The Milky Way is a collection of about 250 billion stars all gravitationally bound together in
a spiral shaped disk. The disk of this galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and nearly
20,000 light years thick. Several evenly spaced arms chock-full of stars spiral out from the
galaxy's center. They're named for the dominant star groupings we see in them from earth.
Altogether the arms and the core of the Milky Way make one complete rotation every
250,000 years. Our sun is positioned near the edge of the galaxy about two-thirds out from
the center, along the Orion-arm.

From the northern hemisphere of earth, the Milky Way is seen usually on a clear summer
night stretching across the sky from north to south. The brilliant stars of the constellations
Cygnus, Sagittarius and Scorpius gleam in the star-studded stream which ancient observers
named the Milky Way because they thought that perhaps their gods had spilled milk on the
heavens!

Teaching teaches the Teacher.

Beware of the anger of the body.
Master the body, let it serve truth

Beware of the anger of the mouth
Master your words, let them serve truth

Beware of the anger of your mind,
Master your thoughts, let them serve truth

The wise:
They have mastered body, word and mind
They are the true Masters.

DHAMMAPADA, The Sayings of Buddha
Love is patient;
Love is kind and envies no one.
There is nothing love cannot face;
There is no limit to its faith, hope and its endurance.
Love will never come to an end.

Seven Social Sins
Politics without principle.
Wealth without work.
Commerce without morality.
Pleasure without conscience.
Education without character.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Mahatma Gandhi

Wherever you live is your temple
if you treat it like one. Buddha

Ironically,
the less you care about seeking approval,
the more approval you seem to get.

People are drawn to those with a quiet, inner confidence,
who don't need to make themselves look good,
to be "right" all the time,
or to steal the glory.

"Sweet are the sounds of the flute and the lute," say those
Who have not heard the sweet prattle of their own children. Tirukkural

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!
Whom dost thou worship
in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open thine eyes and see:
thy God is not before thee!

He is there
where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and
where the path-maker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.

Put off thy holy mantle
and even like him,
come down on the dusty soil!

The point of telling the hero's story is that our identification with the hero allows us, at least
for a time, to move beyond the fear and defensive hesitation
that hold us back from full participation in life. We experience what the Greeks call 'catharsis'.
Catharsis doesn't mean rant and rave and scream and yell, and then there is catharsis. The
cathartic experience is the release experienced in the cessation of the emotions that ordinarily
dominate life, namely fear and guilt. Catharsis happens when we identify with the character
and move along his emotional track until he and we are free of guilt and fear (one also
experiences catharsis from reading modern heroic novels or seeing heroes in movies.)

That's why the stories from ages old have been told, so that you might feel, if only for an
instant, what it is to be so bold, So ALIVE. In that, you find life. You find bliss. You find
courage. You can feel it. Where did it come from? It was there all along, beneath clouds of
shame and fear. Cathartic identification has temporarily blown the clouds away. Now you feel
the pure brilliance of your being. Courage isn't something you've put on. Fear is something
you've taken off. You feel the power and grace of your naked Self.

We all have the capacity to inspire and uplift one another. When you see someone heroically
facing a tragedy of some kind, or heroically working to express their vision of love in action--
it's an inspiration. That person could be black, white, yellow, red, rich or poor, Protestant,
Catholic or a Jew. It doesn't matter. It's the spirit that you identify with. It lifts your spirit to
see someone exalting the human spirit. We can be living examples of human dignity, love and
brotherhood. We can create a society based on love for one another and respect for the
mystery of life.

Who is the pupil?
A child of God, not a tool of the State.

Who is the teacher?
A Guide, not a guard.

Who is a principal?
A master of teaching, not a master of teachers.

What is learning?
A journey, not a destination.

What is discovery?
Questioning the answers, not answering the questions.

What is the process?
Discovering concepts, not covering content.

What is the goal?
Opened minds, not closed issues.

What is the test?
Being and becoming, not remembering and reviewing.

What is a school?
Whatever we choose to make it. Lola May

1. Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to get along without it.
2. Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
3. Needing someone is like needing a parachute.
If he isn't there the first time you need him,
chances are you won't be needing him again.
4. I don't have an attitude problem. You have a perception problem.
5. My Reality Check bounced.
6. On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape key.

We are not punished for our anger;
we are punished by our anger.

Thoughts breed actions of the same kind,
as a seed can grow only into one kind of a tree.
Aptly,
Indian philosophy compares a thought to a seed:
very tiny, but it can grow into
a huge, deep-rooted, wide-spreading tree.
I have seen places
where a seed in a crack in a pavement
grew into a tree that tore up the sidewalk.

It is terribly difficult to undo
the effects of a lifetime of negative thinking,
which can extend into many other people's lives.
But it can be done
and the point of the Gita is to show how.

No man is an island, entirely of himself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promonotory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends
or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore, never send to know
for whom the bell tolls --
it tolls for thee.

To be right, a person must do one of two things:
either he must learn to have God in his work
and hold fast to him there,
or he must give up his work altogether.

Since, however, man cannot live without activities
that are both human and various,
we must learn to keep God in everything we do, and
whatever the job or place, keep on with him,
letting nothing stand in our way.

Far from being desireless, the man or woman (like a Gandhi) who realizes God has yoked all
human passions to the over-riding desire to give, to love and to serve; and in that unification
we can see, not the extinction of personality, but its full blossoming. This is what it means to
be fully human. Our ordinary lives of stimulus and response, getting and spending, seem by
comparison as faint as remembered dreams. This flowering of spirit appeals to everyone.

"This is the true joy in life," says Bernard Shaw:
"the being used for a purpose
recognized by yourself as a mighty one;
the being a force of Nature
instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances,
complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."

We behold what we are,
And we are what we behold.

The mind is limited by its structure.

It observes the so-called outside world, sees its own structure and reports that the world
consists of a multiplicity of separate objects in a framework of space, time and causality
because these are the conditions of its perception. In short, the mind looks at Unity and sees
diversity; it looks at what is timeless and reports transience. The percepts of its experience
are diverse and transient. On this level of experience, separateness is therefore real. Our
mistake is in taking this for ultimate reality, like the dreamer thinking that nothing is real
except his dream.

The person who dis-identifies himself with the conditions of perception in Maya wakes up into
a higher mode of knowing in which the unity of life is apprehended directly. The disciplines
for achieving this are called Yoga -- from the word Yuj to yoke or bind together.

The individual then realizes that he is not a physical creature but Atman, the Self, and thus not
separate from God. He sees the world not as pieces but whole, and he sees the whole as a
manifestation of God. Once identified with the self, he knows that although his body will die,
he will not die; his awareness of this identity is not ruptured by the death of the physical body.
He realizes the essential immortality which is the birthright of every human being. To such a
person, the Gita (2:13, 22) assures, death is no more traumatic than taking off an old coat.
Life cannot offer any higher realization.

Shraddha: the nearest English equivalent is Faith, but it means much more.
It is the seat of values, axioms, prejudices, and pre-possessions that colors our perceptions,
governs our thinking, dictates our responses, and shapes our lives, generally without our
even being aware of its presence and power. Shraddha is not an intellectual abstraction; it is
our very substance.

The Gita says (17:3):
"A person is what his Shraddha is."
The Bible using similar words, says:
"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

There is nothing passive about Shraddha. It is full of potency. For it prompts action,
conditions behavior, and determines how we see and therefore, respond to the world around
us. The power to heal or harm is inherent in our ideas of ourselves.

Yet Shraddha is not brute determination or wishful thinking. Our lives are an eloquent expression of our beliefs: what we deem worth having, doing, attaining, being. What we strive for shows what
we value. We back our Shraddha with our time, our energy, our very lives. Thus Shraddha
determines destiny.

As the Buddha put it:

"All that we are is the result of what we thought.
We are made of our thoughts,
we are molded by our thoughts."

Nearly 40 years ago, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, in his path-breaking book "The Image,"
was already lamenting that Americans lived in a "world where fantasy is more real than reality."
What was true then has become even truer now. Having satisfied most of our material needs,
we have, in true Darwinian fashion, shifted our focus to our psychological needs. We want
to live well in the fullest sense. We want our lives to match our vision of the good life, itself
largely a product of the media. We want to have the right clothes, the right car, the right
house, the right job, the right spouse, the right children, even the right toothpaste: "right"
meaning the ones that complete our self-image. In effect, we want our lives not only to
resemble a movie; we want our lives to be a movie.
This phenomenon was what sociologist David Riesman was describing in his classic study
"The Lonely Crowd," when he coined the term "other-directed" to identify a new type of
individual whose self-esteem derived from his ability to please others. It was also what
Christopher Lasch was describing in his landmark book "The Culture of Narcissism," when
he wrote, "To the performing self the only reality is the identity he can construct out of
materials furnished by advertising and mass culture . . . . Life becomes a work of art."
The reflex among social critics always has been to view this process of life performance and
the attendant loss of authenticity as yet another example of the imminent decline of Western
civilization. One can certainly see why. It is difficult not to agree with those who think that
the transmutation of what we once called "character" into what we now call "personality," of
the life un-selfconsciously lived into the life calculatedly constructed, is a horrible thing that
trivializes us.
As these critics see it, life is not a lark, and its end is not pleasure alone. Life is a difficult and
complicated enterprise. It entails joy but also suffering, gain but also loss, hope but also
despair. Yet, whatever pain these might inflict, one shouldn't wish away the suffering, loss
and despair even if one could. One needs them in order to be fully and feelingly alive. To
deny them would be to deny the process of one's humanization as well as the full range of
human experience. To deny them would be to deny life itself.

You ask:
"What is the difference
between the emptiness of the child
before the formation of the ego
and the awakened childlikeness
of a Buddha?"

This is the difference:

The Buddha has moved into
all the seven stages of ego development
seen them, looked into them,
found that they are illusory,
and has come back home,
has become a child again.

That's what Jesus means when he says:
"Unless you become like small children,
you will not enter into my kingdom of God."

TEN THOUSAND ACTS OF KINDNESS

Why then do most of us have the impression that people are so aggressive, and intrinsically
so? The answer, I think, lies in the asymmetry of effects -- the truly tragic side of human
existence.

Unfortunately, one incident of violence can undo ten thousand acts of kindness, and we easily forget the predominance of kindness over aggression by confusing effect with frequency. One racially
motivated beating can wipe out years of patient education for respect and toleration in a
school or community. One murder can convert a friendly town, replete with trust, into a
nexus of fear with people behind barred doors, suspicious of everyone and afraid to go out
at night. Kindness is so fragile, so easy to efface; violence is so powerful.

This is not an essay about optimism; it is an essay about tragedy. If I felt that humans were
nasty by nature, I would just say: the hell with it. We get what we deserve, or what evolution
left us as a legacy. But the center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of
kindness that define our days. Nothing can be more tragic than that this Everest of geniality
stands upside down on its pointed summit and can be toppled so easily by rare events
contrary to our everyday nature -- and that these rare events make our history. In some
sense, we do not get what we deserve.

The solution to our woes lies not in overcoming our `nature' but in fracturing the `great
asymmetry', and allowing our ordinary propensities to direct our lives. But how can we put
the commonplace into the driver's seat of history?

Stephen Jay Gould who wrote this article teaches biology, geology, and the history of
science at Harvard University.

We cannot direct the wind;
But we can adjust the sails.

The tragedy of a man's life
Is what dies inside of him while he lives.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.
You imagine what you desire;
you will what you imagine,
and at last, you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw

Even the littlest speck of fault in the virtuous
becomes food for gossip among the general public.

There is a space between
man's imagination and man's attainment
that may only be traversed by his longing.

Self righteous morality is jealousy with a halo.

You must lose a fly
to catch a trout

The reason for a fish trap is the fish.
When you've got the fish, you can forget the trap.

The rabbit is the reason for the snare.
When you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare.

The meaning of the song in your heart is the reason for the words;
but once you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.

Where can I find someone
who has forgotten the words---
to have a word with!

Stories from ages-old have been told,
so that you might feel, if only for an instant,
what it is to be so bold, so ALIVE.
In that, you find life. You find bliss. You find courage. You can feel it.
Where did it come from?
It was there all along,
beneath clouds of shame and fear.

Cathartic identification
has temporarily blown the clouds away.
Now you feel the pure brilliance of your Being.
Courage isn't something you've put on.
Fear is something you've taken off.
You feel the power and grace of your naked Self.

Your imagination
is your preview
of life's coming attractions
"When people reach the highest perfection,
it is nothing special;
it is their normal condition"....Hindu saying

God created woman.
And boredom did indeed cease from that moment--
but many other things ceased as well!
Woman was God's second mistake.

The ultimate goal of all mankind,
the aim and end of all religions,
is but one -
reunion with God.

I have been insulted! I have been hurt!
I have been beaten! I have been robbed!

Anger ceases in those
who do not harbour this sort of thought.

Occasions of hatred
are certainly never settled by hatred.

They are settled by freedom from hatred.
This is the eternal law.

In the same way
that rain breaks into a house with a bad roof,
desire breaks into the mind that has not been practising meditation.

While in the same way
that rain cannot break into a well-roofed house,
desire cannot break into a mind that has been practising meditation well.

Even if he is fond of quoting appropriate texts,
the thoughtless man who does not put them into practice himself,
is like the cowherd counting other people's cows--
not a partner in the Holy Life.

Attention leads to immortality.
Carelessness leads to death.
Those who pay attention will not die,
while the careless are as good as dead already.

So having clearly understood the value of attention,
wise men take pleasure in it,
rejoicing in what the saints have practised.

Those who meditate with perseverance,
constantly working hard at it,
are the wise who experience Nirvana,
the ultimate freedom from chains.
It is not the shortcomings of others,
nor what others have done or not done
that one should think about,
but what one has done or not done oneself.

Don't burn a blanket because of one flea;
Don't waste a whole day on trivial irritation.

Enveloped in darkness as you are,
will you not look for a lamp?

There is no fire like desire.
There is no weakness like anger.

There is no fire like desire.
There is no hold like anger.

There is no net like ignorance.
There is no river like craving.

The realized Ones work from pleasure;
The rest, work for pleasure.

If I have seen further,
it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

If you would hit the mark,
You must aim a little above it.
Every arrow that flies
Feels the attraction of earth.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage,
half shut afterward.

The Rosicrucian philosophy does not offer hope. It brings about the state of mind that the
Hindu writer subtly terms "hopelessness." That is a state in which there is no hope, because
hope has given place to certainty. The Rosicrucian teaching specifically declares that man
may have definite, firsthand knowledge that his conscious existence is not limited to life in a
physical body. It does not bid us hope, it shows us how to 'learn'.
It bids us learn, first of all, that the natural processes that result in death are not inimical to
man. It says, "learn to think of physical dissolution as being a process that has positive
advantages for the race and for the individual. You are mistaken when you think death is
your enemy. Learn what death really is, and you will find that it is a friend....."
One of the first fruits of Rosicrucian practice is that the aspirant comes to know that he does
not and 'cannot' die. The ability to remember what happens to personality while one is "out of
the body" is by no means a mark of adeptship, by no means evidence of mastery. It is fairly early in the
course of rightly directed practice that one builds brain cells that record this type of
experience. For such persons the sting of death is removed, in as much as they know that
death is no more than the laying aside of the outermost vesture of personality. Their "out of
the body" experiences enable them to answer to themselves the question "What happens
when we die?"
Thenceforth, for them, not only the fear of dying but also the thought of death as an enemy
comes to an end.

Chithaa Chinthaa samaa prokthaa bindu maathra viseshathaa
sajiivam dhaahathe chinthaa nirjeevam dhaahathe chithaa.

The words 'chithaa' and 'chinthaa' sound very similar .
the only difference being the anusvar
(the dot on chi corresponding to 'n').
They are similar too in what they mean.
Chinthaa (worry) consumes human beings when alive,
Chithaa (funeral pyre), when dead.

Do you pay regular visits to yourself?
Don't argue or answer rationally.

According to convention,
I am not simply what I am doing now.
I am also what I have done,
and my conventionally edited version of my past
is made to seem almost more the "real me"
than what I am at this moment.

For, what I am seems so fleeting and intangible,
but what I was is fixed and final.
It is the firm basis for predictions
of what I will be in the future,

And so it comes about that
I am more closely identified
with what no longer exists
than with what actually is! Alan B. Watts, The Way of Zen

I begin to see what is there
without continuously labeling the events
with the colors of my judgments and values...

I see the way someone behaves
and do not feel that it is either bad or good.
That desire has melted away
by feelings of respect for the other's independence.

He or she is not there anyway
to suit or to satisfy my view of the world.

While day by day the overzealous student
stores up facts for future use,
he who has learned to trust nature
finds that he needs ever fewer external directions.
He will discard formula after formula,
until he reaches the conclusion:
Let nature take its course.

By letting each thing
act in accordance with its own nature,
everything that needs to be done gets done. Lao Tzu

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand.
The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat.
You pull the tail in New York,
and it meows in Los Angeles.
The wireless is the same,
but without the cat.

Any path is only a path,
and there is no affront, to oneself or to others,
in dropping it
if that is what your heart tells you...
Look at every path closely and deliberately.
Try it as many times as you think necessary.
Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question...
Does this path have a heart?
If it does, the path is good;
if it doesn't it is of no use.

Most do not fully see this truth
that life is difficult. Instead,
they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly,
about the enormity of their problems,
their burdens, and their difficulties
as if life were generally easy,
as if life should be easy.

They voice their belief, noisily or subtly,
that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has
somehow been especially visited upon them,
or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species,
and not upon others.

Rules only make sense
if they are both kept and broken.
Breaking the rule
is one way of observing it.

Awareness is not the same as thought.
It lies beyond thinking.
Although awareness makes no use of thinking,
it honors it's value and it's power.

Awareness is more like a vessel
which can hold and contain our thinking,
helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts,
rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

Pride attaches undue importance
to the superiority of one's status in the eyes of others;

When one sets his heart on being highly esteemed,
and achieves such rating,
then he is automatically involved
in fear of losing his status.

For, shame is the fear of humiliation
at one's inferior status in the estimation of others. Lao Tzu

Pure logical thinking
cannot yield us any knowledge
of the empirical world.
All knowledge of reality
starts from experience
and ends in it.

Propositions arrived at by purely logical means
are completely empty of reality.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Your own gift you can present every moment
with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation;
but of the adopted talent of another
you have only an extemporaneous half possession...

It is immediately apparent...
that this sense-world,
this seemingly real external universe,
though it may be useful and valid in other respects,
cannot be the external world,
but only the self's projected picture of it...
The evidence of the senses cannot be accepted
as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality.

Without going out-of-doors,
one can know all one needs to know.
Without even looking out of his window,
one can grasp the nature of everything.
Without going beyond his own nature,
one can achieve ultimate wisdom.
Therefore, the intelligent man knows
all he needs to know, without going away
and sees all he needs to see
without looking elsewhere,
And does all he needs to do
without undue exertion. Lao Tzu

Underneath the superficial self,
which pays attention to this and that,
there is another self more really us than I.
And the more you become aware
of this unknown self if you become aware of it
the more you realize that it is inseparably connected
with everything else that premature death may come as a result of sickness;
but, like birth, death as such is not a sickness at all.
It is the natural and necessary end of human life,
as natural as leaves falling in the autumn.
Physicians should therefore,
explore the possibility of treating death and its pangs
as they have treated labor and its 'pains'.
Death is, after all, a great event.
So long as it is not imminent,
we cling to ourselves and our lives
in chronic anxiety pushed into the back of the mind.
But when the time comes
when clinging is no longer of the least avail,
the circumstances are ideal for letting go of oneself completely.
When this happens,
the individual is released from his ego-prison.
In the normal course of events this is the golden opportunity
for awakening into the knowledge
that one's actual self is the Self which plays the universe,
an occasion for great rejoicing.

Occasions of hatred
are certainly never settled by hatred.
They are settled by freedom from hatred.
This is the eternal law.
Others may not understand
that we must practice self-control,
but quarrelling dies away in those
who understand this fact.

The scent of flowers cannot travel against the wind,
nor can that of sandal-wood or jasmine.
But the fragrance of the good
does travel against the wind:
a good man perfumes the four quarters of the earth.

He who binds to himself a joy
does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity's sunrise.

Weave in Faith;
God will provide the thread.

Most of us have an inner authority (ego)
telling us who we are and
what ought to do.
We carry out its orders
without questioning who's in charge.
But that inner authority has no real knowledge
other than what is based on the past.
It has no real power over you.
If you don't respond to it,
it will just fade away.

You will then hear another voice
which is softer, loving -- yet persistent.
Listen to it and its advice:
"Let go of the patterns and habits from the past,
and be free to make wise choices
in the present moment."

Blessed indeed is the baby
with a loving grand-mother,
who sees him as a bird with broken wings,
tossed down on earth for her to take charge of.
The Shirdi Sai Baba is batting on her side:
He said:
"Be kind to little children;
they are soft like the ground beneath the Tulsi plant."

A happy parent makes a better parent.

Life comes from the Mind
and is sustained by the mind.

You can have anything you want
if you will give up the belief
that you can't have it.

All action is disintegrative.
Action creates illusion
that does not in the least deceive the wise
but makes the ignorant believe
that something is brought into being
when a form is made to appear through action.
Those who know understand
that whenever one type of form appears
another type disappears.

Apply cold to water.
The liquid vanishes as the ice forms.
Bring the ice into a warm room.
As the ice melts, water makes its appearance again.
So it is with every other production of form.
The integration of any specific form
is the dis-integration of another form
that is in complementary relation to it.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery,
a metaphor for a proof,
a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths,
and oneself for an Oracle,
is inborn in us.

Beware!
Anger is a weed.
Remove it ---
At Once.
Else,
it will occupy
your whole mind
and destroy you.

What has learning profited a man,
if it has not led him to worship the Good Feet of Him
who is pure knowledge itself?

I am only one, but still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
but still I can do something.
I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

When a man is wrapped up in himself,
he makes a pretty small package.

Love is the whole history of a woman's life;
it is but an episode in a man's.

He who lives truly in his own heart,
Truly lives in the hearts of all people.

The Master in the art of living
makes little distinction
between his work and play,
his mind and body,
his education and his recreation.
He hardly knows which is which.
He simply pursues his vision of excellence
in whatever he does,
leaving others to decide
whether he is working or playing.
To him, he is always doing both.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there.
I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there.
I did not die.
Prayer of the Makah Tribe

No valid plans for the future can be made by those
who have no capacity for living now.

To be a good person,
it is always necessary to ask before doing something,
"Is it right?"
To be physically fit,
it is necessary to ask before eating something,
"Is it healthful?"
To be a happy person,
it is necessary to ask before acting,
"Is it meaningful?"
The problem, of course, is that
the good action, the healthful food,
and the meaningful behavior
are rarely the most enticing of our choices
which only proves, once again,
that the greatest battle for happiness
is with our own nature.

Painting is silent poetry, and
Poetry is painting that speaks

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
This is true not only of competition with others, but competition with ourselves too.

Do you have a sense of beauty in your life, or is it mediocre, meaningless, an everlasting
struggle from morning until night? What is beauty? It isn't a sensual question, nor a
sexual question. It is a very serious question because without beauty in your heart, you
cannot flower in goodness.
Have you ever looked at a mountain or the blue sea without chattering, without making noise,
really paying attention to the blue sea, the beauty of the water, the beauty of light on a sheet
of water? When you see the extraordinary beauty of the earth, its rivers, lakes, mountains,
what actually takes place? What takes place when you look at something which is actually
marvellously beautiful: a statue, a poem, a lily in the pond, or a well-kept lawn?
At that moment, the very majesty of a mountain makes you forget yourself. Have you ever been in that position?
If you have, you have seen that then you don't exist, only that grandeur exists. But a
few seconds later or a minute later, the whole cycle begins, the confusion, the chatter. So
beauty is, where you are not. It is a tragedy if you don't see this. Truth is, where you
are not. Beauty is, love is, where you are not. We are not capable of looking at this
extraordinary thing called truth.

To look is one of the most difficult things in life or to listen; to look and listen are the same.
If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset. Most of
us have lost touch with nature. Civilization is tending more and more towards large cities. We
are becoming more and more an urban people, living in crowded apartments and having very
little space even to look at the sky of an evening and morning, and therefore we are losing
touch with a great deal of beauty. I don't know if you have noticed how few of us look
at a sunrise or a sunset or the moonlight or the reflection of light on water.
Having lost touch with nature we naturally tend to develop intellectual capacities. We read a
great many books, go to a great many museums and concerts, watch television and have many
other entertainments. We quote endlessly from other people's ideas and think and talk a great deal about art.
Why is it that we depend so much upon art? Is it a form of escape, of stimulation?
If you are directly in contact with nature; if you watch the movement of a bird on the wing,
see the beauty of every movement of the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or the beauty
on the face of another, do you think you will want to go to any museum to look at any
picture?

How does one find out about this strange thing that we all have to meet one day or another?
Can you die psychologically today, die to everything that you have known? For instance: to
die to your pleasure, to your attachment, your dependence, to end it without arguing, without
rationalizing, without trying to find ways and means of avoiding it. Do you know what it means
to die, not physically, but psychologically, inwardly? Which means to put an end to that which
has continuity; to put an end to your ambition, because that's what's going to happen when you
die, isn't it? You can't carry it over and sit next to God! (Laughter)
When you actually die, you have to end so many things without any argument.
You can't say to death, "Let me finish my job, let me
finish my book, all the things I have not done, let me heal the hurts which I have given others"
- you have no time.
So can you find out how to live a life now, today, in which there is always an ending to
everything that you began? Not in your office of course, but inwardly to end all the
knowledge that you have gathered - knowledge being your experiences, your memories,
your hurts, the comparative way of living, comparing yourself always with somebody else.
To end all that every day, so that the next day your mind is fresh and young. Such a mind
can never be hurt, and that is innocence.
One has to find out for oneself what it means to die; then there is no fear, therefore every day
is a new day - and I really mean this, one can do this - so that your mind and your eyes see
life as something totally new. That is eternity. That is the quality of the mind that has come
upon this timeless state, because it has known what it means to die every day to everything
it has collected during the day. Surely, in that there is love. Love is something totally new
every day, but pleasure is not, pleasure has continuity. Love is always new and therefore it
is its own eternity.

There is a vast distinction between intellect and intelligence. Intellect is merely thought
functioning independently of emotion. When intellect, irrespective of emotion, is trained in
any particular direction, one may have great intellect, but one does not have intelligence,
because in intelligence there is the inherent capacity to feel as well as to reason; in
intelligence both capacities are equally present, intensely and harmoniously.
If you watch very carefully, you will see that though the response, the movement of thought,
seems so swift, there are gaps, there are intervals between thoughts. Between two thoughts
there is a period of silence which is not related to the thought process. If you observe you
will see that that period of silence, that interval, is not of time and the discovery of that
interval, the full experiencing of that interval, liberates you from conditioning or rather it
does not liberate 'you' but there is liberation from conditioning. It is only when the mind
is not giving continuity to thought, when it is still with a stillness that is not induced, that is
without any causation it is only then that there can be freedom from the background.

Truth is a pathless land;
you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever,
by any religion, by any sect.

The angels know
that too many practical men eat their bread
with the sweat of the dreamer's brow.

An invasion of armies can be resisted,
but not an idea whose time has come.

You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley.
If you would attain to the mountain-top
you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps,
unafraid of the dangerous precipices.
You must climb towards the Truth,
it cannot be "stepped down" or organized for you.

An organization becomes a framework
into which its members can conveniently fit.
They no longer strive after Truth or the mountain-top,
but rather carve for themselves a convenient niche
in which they put themselves,
or let the organization place them,
and consider that the organization
will thereby lead them to Truth.

If an organization be created
to lead man to spirituality,
it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage,
and must cripple the individual,
and prevent him from growing,
from establishing his uniqueness,
which lies in the discovery for himself
of that absolute, unconditioned Truth.

Your belief has not transformed you but only complicated you.
You are not willing to face things as they are.
You want to have your own gods -- new gods instead of the old,
new religions instead of the old, new forms instead of the old--
all equally valueless, all barriers, all limitations, all crutches.
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.

Your prejudices, your fears, your authorities, your churches new and old - -
all these, I maintain, are a barrier to understanding.
I cannot make myself clearer than this.

Truth is in everyone;
it is not far, it is not near;
it is eternally there.
Organizations cannot make you free.
No man from outside can make you free;
nor can organized worship, nor the immolation of yourselves for a cause,
make you free;
nor can forming yourselves into an organization,
nor throwing yourselves into works, make you free.
You use a typewriter to write letters,
but you do not put it on an altar and worship it.
But that is what you are doing
when organizations become your chief concern.
"How many members are there in it?"
That is the first question I am asked by all newspaper reporters.
"How many followers have you?
By their number we shall judge whether what you say is true or false."
I do not know how many there are. I am not concerned with that.
As I said, if there were even one man who had been set free, that were enough.
You have the idea that only certain people
hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness.
No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key.
That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification
and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity.

All sentiment, all emotions have to do with thought
and therefore, lead to pleasure and pain.
Love has no pain, no sorrow,
because it is not the outcome of pleasure or desire.

Envy and jealousy are not love and I wipe them out;
I don't go on talking about how to wipe them out
and in the meantime continue to be envious -
I actually wipe them out
as the rain washes the dust of many days off a leaf,
I just wash them away.
Sentiment and emotion breed cruelty.
Have you ever looked at it?
Identification with the rag called the national flag
is an emotional and sentimental factor
and for that factor, you are willing to kill another -
and that is called, the love of your country, love of the neighbor?
One can see that where sentiment and emotion come in,
Love is not.
It is emotion and sentiment that breed the cruelty of like and dislike.

How is it possible for the mind to be free?
To be free, the mind must not only see and understand its pendulum-like swing
between the past and the future
but also be aware of the interval between thoughts...

If you watch very carefully, you will see that though the response, the movement of thought,
seems so swift, there are gaps, there are intervals between thoughts. Between two thoughts
there is a period of silence which is not related to the thought process. If you observe you
will see that that period of silence, that interval, is not of time and the discovery of that
interval, the full experiencing of that interval, liberates you from conditioning or rather it does
not liberate 'you' but there is liberation from conditioning....
It is only when the mind is not giving continuity to thought, when it is still with a stillness that
is not induced, that is without any causation, it is only then that there can be freedom from
the background.

We are our own greatest surprise.
Faith as tiny as a grain of sand allows us to move mountains..........
The apostles were fishermen, illiterate and ignorant.
But they accepted the flame that fell from the heavens.
They were not ashamed of their own ignorance;
They had faith in the Holy Spirit.
This gift is there for anyone who will accept it.
One has only to believe, accept, and be willing to make mistakes........
Accept the gift. And then, it manifests itself.

God is the same,
even though He has a thousand names.
It is up to us to select a name for Him.

Happiness multiplies
when it is divided!

"CRAZY WISDOM", by Skip Nisker
Albert Camus wrote of the "absurd man" who must find a different approach to life and
another mode of understanding. Any Eastern sage would be pleased with Camus' phrase
"lucid indifference," which sounds similar to the "just being" of Zen or the deliberate "non-doing"
of Taoism.
However, unlike the Taoist at peace with the Tao, Camus himself never made peace with
the absurd, and it is widely believed he committed suicide. He was well aware of his dilemma:
If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather
this problem would not arise. For I should belong to this world. I should 'be' this world to
which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon
familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation.
I cannot cross it out with a stroke of the pen.
Camus wanted out of his mind and into "being". Instead of his "insistence on familiarity",
he wanted to become comfortable with unfamiliarity. But no Taoist or Zen master was a
round to give Camus lessons; there was no tradition in the West to accommodate his
yearnings, no methods to transform his "existentialism" into a way of life. He was a man of
philosophy, and when the thinking game could not hold him up, he sank.

"THE ILLUMINATED RUMI", translated by Coleman Barks

We are the mirror as well as the face in it
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity
We are the pain and what cures pain
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speech by J.Krishnamurti:

"I repeat that I have no disciples. Each one of you is a disciple who understands the truth
and doesn't follow any single person ... The truth doesn't give hope, it gives understanding ..
I claim also that all ceremonials are superfluous for spiritual growth ... When you want to
search the truth, you have to exceed the limitations of the human mind and heart widely and
find it there, and this truth is within yourself. Isn't it much simpler to make life itself a goal,
instead of having messengers, gurus who must inevitably narrow the truth and thus deny it ...
I claim that liberation is possible at each stage of evolution for a human who understands,
and that it is not necessary to worship the stages, as you are doing it ... Don't quote me as
an authority later. I refuse to be your crutch. I will not let you put me into a cage for your
admiration. When you take the fresh air from the top of the mountain into a small chamber,
the freshness of this air will vanish, and stagnation is the result ... I have never said there is
no god, I have said there is only god as it is manifest within you. But I will not use the word
"god" ... I prefer to call it "life" ... Of course there is neither the good nor the bad. The good
is what you don't fear, the bad is what you fear. Thus when you destroy the fear, you will be
full of spirituality ... When you love life and put this love before everything else and measure
everything with this love and don't judge it with your fear, then this stagnation you call moral
will vanish ... Don't speculate, friends, who I am, you will never know it ... Do you think the
truth has anything to do with what you think I were? You don't care for the truth. You are
only interested in that what contains the truth ... Drink the water when it is pure: I tell you,
I have this pure water. I have this balsam, which purifies, which will heal wonderfully, and
you ask me: Who are you? I am everything, since I am life."
When he dissolved the "Order of the Star":
"I claim that the truth is a pathless territory. And one cannot approach it by any path, by any
religion or sect. This is my point of view, and I hold it absolutely and unconditionally ...
Once you have understood this, you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.
A belief is an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you still do it, it
dies, it crystalizes itself and becomes a belief system, a sect, a religion, which will be forced
onto others. Everybody throughout the world tries to do that. The truth becomes narrowed
and a toy for those who are weak, who are only temporarily dissatisfied. The truth cannot be
lowered, but each one has to come up to it. You cannot take the top of the mountain into the
valley ... Thus from my viewpoint this is the first reason to dissolve the Order of the Star.
You will probably found other orders, you will still participate in other organizations searching
for the truth. I don't want to be part of any spiritual organization, please understand that ...
When an organization is created for that purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a chain
and will mutilate the individual and will be a hindrance to it, it will prevent it to found its
uniqueness, which consists in its own way to find this absolute, unconditional truth for itself.
Thus this is another reason why I have decided, as I am the leader of this order, to dissolve it.
This is no great action. Since I don't want any followers, and I mean it that way. In the
moment you follow anybody, you stop following the truth. I'm not interested whether or not
you listen to what I say. I want to cause something specific in the world, and I will perform
that with imperturbable concentration. I do only deal with one essential matter, to liberate
humans. I want to liberate them from all jails, from all fears and prevent them to create new
theories or philosophies, to found new religions or new sects. Thus you will of course ask me
why I'm travelling throughout the world and talk. I will tell you why I'm doing that.
Not because I wish to have followers or a particular group of disciples. I have no disciples,
no apostles, neither on earth nor in the mental realm. I'm not attracted by the temptation of
money or the desire to have a comfortable life. If I wanted to have a comfortable life,
I wouldn't visit a camp, neither would I live in a wet country! I'm now speaking very openly,
since I want to clarify that once and for all. I don't want to perform this childish discussion
every year again. For eighteen years you have been preparing for this event, the appearance
of the world teacher. For eighteen years you have organized, have searched for somebody
who would bring new delightment to your heart and your mind. For somebody who would
raise you to a new level of life, who would encourage you, who would liberate you. And now
look what happens! Think about it, consider it yourself, and thereby detect how this belief
has changed yourself. Not by carrying some sign. That is trivial, absurd. In which way did
such a belief throw away all inessential things? Only this way you can judge. In which way did
you become more free, greater, more dangerous for this society, which is based on the false
and inessential? In which way have the members of this organization of the Star changed?
With respect to your spirituality you rely on somebody else. You rely on somebody else for
your happiness, for your enlightenment. When I say look within yourself, seek there for your
enlightenment, for your greatness, for your purification and the purity of your self - then none
of you wants to do that. There may be a few, very few. Thus why should we have an
organization? You need a typewriter to write a letter, but you don't put the typewriter onto
an altar to admire it. But that's what you are doing when organizations become your main
concern. But those who really want to understand, who are seeking for the eternal, for that
what is without beginning or ending, will proceed together with greater intensity, will become
a danger for all inessential, for all unreal, for the shadows ... We have to create such a body,
and this is my intention. Due to this true friendship - which you don't seem to know - there
will be a real cooperation of all. This will not happen because of an authority or for some
redemption, but because you will really understand and thus are capable of living in the
eternal. This is something greater as all amusement, as all sacrifice. Thus those are some of
the reasons why I have made this decision after careful consideration. It doesn't result from
some momentary impulse. Neither did anybody persuade me to it. I cannot be persuaded
about such matters. For two years I have been considering it carefully and patiently, and now
I have decided to dissolve the order. You can found other organizations and wait for another
one. It doesn't interest me. Neither am I interested in your jails or in new decorations for those
jails, nor in creating them. I am only concerned with the absolute, unconditional liberation of
humans."

When asked about god in the traditional sense:
"We have invented god. The thinking created god for itself. That means, due to unhappiness,
fear and depression we created something, called god. God didn't create us after his image -
I wished he had. Personally I have no belief in anything, the speaker just faces that what is,
what are facts, the recognition of the essence of each fact, each thought, all reactions. He is
fully aware of all that. When you are free of fear, free of suffering, there is no desire for a god."
"When you get rid of attachment, there will be love ... When one wants to meet, understand,
know oneself, one has to put aside every form of authority ... There is nothing to be learned
from somebody else, including the speaker ... The speaker doesn't have anything he could
teach you ... The speaker is only a mirror where you can see yourself. Then, when you
recognize yourself clearly, you can put aside the mirror."
"When humans will not radically change themselves, perform a fundamental change in
themselves - not with god or prayers, all this stuff is too immature, too infantile - then we will
destroy ourselves. NOW a revolution in the psyche is possible, not thousand years later. We
are living for thousands of years, and we are still barbarians. So if we don't change ourselves
now, we will still be barbarians tomorrow or in thousands of tomorrows. When I don't stop
war today, I will go to war tomorrow. Expressed simply: The future is now."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Every thought and feeling must flower for them to live and die; flowering of everything in you,
the ambition, the greed, the hate, the joy, the passion; in the flowering there is their death and
freedom. It is only in freedom that anything can flourish, not in suppression, in control and
discipline; these only pervert, corrupt. Flowering and freedom is goodness and all virtue. To
allow envy to flower is not easy; it is condemned or cherished but never given freedom. It is
only in freedom the fact of envy reveals its colour, its shape, its depth, its peculiarities; if
suppressed it will not reveal itself fully and freely. When it has shown itself completely, there is
an ending of it only to reveal another fact, emptiness, loneliness, fear, and as each fact is
allowed to flower, in freedom, in its entirety, the conflict between the observer and the
observed ceases; there is no longer the censor but only observation, only seeing. Freedom can
only be in completion not in repetition, suppression, obedience to a pattern of thought. There is
completion only in flowering and dying; there is no flowering if there is no ending. What has
continuity is thought in time. The flowering of thought is the ending of thought; for only in
death there is the new. The new cannot be if there is no freedom from the known. Thought,
the old, cannot bring into being the new; it must die for the new to be. What flowers must
come to an end."

From Krishnamurti's Notebook (written 1961/62), Harper & Row , 1984;

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"All existence is choice. Choice, in every form, is conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction, inner and outer breeds confusion and misery. To escape from this misery, gods, beliefs, nationalism, commitment to various patterns of activities become compulsive necessities. Having escaped, they become all important and escape is the way of illusion; then fear and anxiety set in. Despair and sorrow is the way of choice and there is no end to pain. Choice, selection, must always exist as long as there is the chooser, the accumulated memory of pain and pleasure, and every experience of choice only strengthens memory whose response becomes thought and feeling. Memory has only a partial significance, to respond mechanically; this response is choice. There is no freedom in choice. You choose according to the background you have been brought up in, according to to your social, economic, religious conditioning. Choice invariably strengthens this conditioning; there is no escape from this conditioning, it only breeds more suffering. [...]

Choice is always breeding misery. Watch it and you will see it, lurking, demanding, insisting and begging, and before you know where you are you are caught in its net of inescapable duties, responsibilities and despairs. Watch it and you will be aware of the fact. Be aware of the fact; you cannot change the fact; you may cover it up, run away from it, but you cannot change it. It is there. If you will let it alone, not interfering with it with your opinions and hopes, fears and despairs, with your calculated and cunning judgements, it will flower and show all its intricacies, its subtle ways and there are many, its seeming importance and ethics, its hidden motives and fancies. If you will leave the fact alone, it will show you all these and more. But you must be choicelessly aware of it, walking softly. Then you will see that choice, having flowered, dies and there is freedom, not that you are free but there is freedom. You are the maker of choice; you have ceased to make choice. There is nothing to choose. Out of this choiceless state there flowers aloneness. Its death is never ending. It is always flowering and it is always new. Dying to the known is to be alone. All choice is in the field of the known; action in this field always breeds sorrow. There is the ending of sorrow in aloneness."

uote #004 -
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"To the so-called religious, to be sensitive is to sin --- an evil reserved for the worldly. To the religious, the beautiful is temptation --- to be resisted; it's an evil distraction to be denied.
Good works are not a substitute for love, and without love all activity leads to sorrow--- noble or ignoble. The essence of affection is sensitivity and without it all worship is an escape from reality. To the monk, to the sanyasi, the senses are the way of pain, except thought which must be dedicated to the god of their conditioning.
But thought is of the senses. It is thought that puts together time and it is thought that makes sensitivity sinful. To go beyond thought is virtue and that virtue is heightened sensitivity which is love.
Love and there is no sin; love and do what you will and then there is no sorrow."

Quote #005 -
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"You cannot see and listen to the outside without wandering on to the inside. Really the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside and it is difficult, almost impossible to separate them. You look at this magnificent tree and you wonder who is watching whom and presently there is no watcher at all. Everything is so intensively alive and there is only life and the watcher is as dead as the leaf. There is no dividing line between the tree, the birds and that man sitting in the shade and the earth that is so abundant. Virtue is there without thought and so there is order; order is not permanent; it is there only from moment to moment [...]"

Quote #006 -
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The Pitcher Can Never be Filled

Meditation is like going to a well, the waters of which are inexhaustible, with a pitcher that is always empty. The pitcher can never be filled. What is important is the drinking of the waters and not how full the pitcher is. The pitcher must be broken to drink the water. The pitcher is the centre which is always seeking - and so it can never find.

To seek is to deny the truth that is right in front of you. Your eyes must see that which is the nearest; and the seeing of that is a movement without end. He who seeks projects that which he seeks and so he lives in an illusion, always striving within the limits of his own shadow. Not to seek is to find; and the finding is not in the future - it is there, where you don't look. The looking is ever present, from which all life and action takes place. Meditation is the blessing of this action.

Seeking is a personal drive from the centre - to attain, to belong, to hold. In inquiry there is freedom from the very beginning; looking is the freedom from the weight of yesterday.

From "Meeting Life", by J. Krishnamurti

'What is a religious man?' (Huxley asking K.)

Krishnamurti changed his tone and rhythm. He spoke now calmly, with incisiveness. 'I will tell you what a religious man is. First of all, a religious man is a man who is alone - not lonely, you understand, but alone - with no theories or dogmas, no opinion, no background. He is alone and loves it - free of conditioning and alone - and enjoying it. Second, a religious man must be both man and woman - I don't mean sexually - but he must know the dual nature of everything; a religious man must feel and be both masculine and feminine. Third,' and now his manner intensified again, 'to be a religious man, one must destroy everything - destroy the past, destroy one's convictions, interpretations, deceptions - destroy ALL self-hypnosis - destroy until there is no center; you understand, NO CENTER.' He stopped.

No center?

After a silence Krishnamurti said quietly,
'Then you are a religious person. Then stillness comes. Completely still.'

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants.
The question is, what are we busy about?"

ERMA BOMBECK QUOTES
"If I had my life to live over"
I would have talked less and listened more.
I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded
I would have eaten the popcorn in the 'good' living room and worried much less about the dirt when someone wanted to light a fire in the fireplace
I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather ramble about his youth.
I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage
I would have cried and laughed less while watching television and more while watching life.
I would have shared more of the responsibility carried by my husband
I would have gone to bed when I was sick instead of pretending the earth would go into a holding pattern if I weren't there for the day
Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished every moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in my life to assist God in a miracle\plain\f3\fs24

Tobaco is a filthy weed,
that from the devil does proceed,
It drains your purse, it burns your clothes,
and makes a chimney of yor nose"
{\f3\froman AbcApple;} "THE ZEN OF EATING", Ronna Kabatznick, Ph.D.

There's a powerful image to depict the futility of pursuing one object of desire after another:
\b The Hungry Ghost\plain\f4\fs22 .
Hungry Ghosts are large, mythic beings with huge, distended bellies and extremely narrow throats. They try to eat, but their narrow throats prevent them from getting the fulfillment they crave. No matter what they do and how hard they try, they feel empty and unsatisfied. The Hungry Ghost is not just a figure in Buddhist mythology. There's a Hungry Ghost in each of us, too. (cf. Kirti Mukha)
Every time you puruse your desires blindly, you activate the Hungry Ghost. It often takes the form of a convincing inner voice that says,
"You can feel satisfied all the time. You can make the good times last.
Keep looking --It's out there".
The more you respond to your Hungry Ghost, the more demanding it becomes. It hammers away at you, spitting out desire after desire. You're so busy chasing desire after desire that you don't see that the Hungry Ghost is running your life. If you don't recognize its presence, you wonder why you feel so bad when all these things and experiences are supposed to make you feel so good.\plain\f5\fs24

{\f3\froman\fprq2 Times New Roman;}}
{\colortbl\red0\green0\blue0;\red255\green0\blue0;}
\deflang1033dFaith has to do with things that are not seen, and hope with things that are not in hand. Saint Thomas Acquinas
Faith is a continuation of reason. William Adams
In faith and hope the world will disagree, but all mankind's concern is charity. Alexander The Great
Faith is a higher faculty than reason. Henry Christopher Bailey
Ibelieve though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind. St. Bernard
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made... [Romans 1:20] Bible
For verily I say unto you, that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Bible
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. [Hebrews 11:1] Bible
Isee heaven's glories shine and faith shines equal... Emily Bronte
Ifeel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels. Pearl S. Buck
What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, "I bet that my Redeemer liveth." Samuel Butler
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes. Thomas Carlyle
Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time. Oswald Chambers
Do you know how to digest your food? Do you know how to fill your lungs with air? Do you know how to establish, regulate and direct the metabolism of your body -- the assimilation of foodstuff so that it builds muscles, bones and flesh? No, you don't know how consciously, but there is a wisdom within you that does know.
d\qc Donald Curtis
dFaith is not contrary to reason\'85 Sherwood Eddy
To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty... this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. Albert Einstein
Our faith comes in moments... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is faith among men that holds the moral elements of society together, as it is faith in God that binds the world to his throne. William M. Evarts
The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason. Benjamin Franklin
Non-violence is my article of faith. Mahatma Gandhi
Faith in the ability of a leader is of slight service unless it be united with faith in his justice. George W. Goethals
Afaith to live by, a self to live with, and a purpose to live for.
Bob Harrington
The farther we go, the more the ultimate explanation recedes from us, and all we have left is faith. Vaclav Hlavaty
God does not require you to follow His leadings on blind trust. Behold the evidence of an invisible intelligence pervading everything, even your own mind and body. Raymond Holliwell
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. William James
There is no great future for any people whose faith has burned out. Rufus M. Jones
All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine. James Joyce
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further. Soren Kierkegaard
Faith is the refusal to panic. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent. Sophia Loren
You should not believe your conscience and your feelings more than the word which the Lord who receives sinners preaches to you. Martin Luther
Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. Herman Melville
My faith is the grand drama of my life. I'm a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none. Olivier Messiaen
faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree. Thus faith and works together grow, No separate life they never can know. They're soul and body, hand and heart, What God hath joined, let no man part. Hannah More
That's the thing about faith. If you don't have it you can't understand it. And if you do, no explanation is necessary.
Major Kira Nerys
It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing. ogetCardinal J. Newman
Life is a battle between faith and reason in which each feeds upon the other, drawing sustenance from it and destroying it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other. Blaise Pascal
Weave in faith and God will provide the thread. Indian Proverb
Aperson consists of his faith. Whatever is his faith, even so is he.
Indian proverb (yath Bhavah thath bhavathi)
Faith is trust in what the spirit learned eons ago. B.H. Roberts
Afaith that hasn't been tested can't be trusted. Adrian Rogers
The errors of faith are better than the best thoughts of unbelief.
Thomas Russell
As the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists.
William Salter
Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument. George Sand
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession. George Bernard Shaw
It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him. Sydney Smith
Your faith is what you believe, not what you know.
John Lancaster Spalding
When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly. Edward Teller
Faith lives in honest doubt. Lord Alfred Tennyson
The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures. Henry David Thoreau
Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity? Alexis De Tocqueville
Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ. A. W. Tozer
Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation. Elton Trueblood
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of faith. Source Unknown
Faith is like electricity. You can't see it, but you can see the light. Source Unknown
We seldom lose our faith by a blow out; usually it is just a slow leak. Source Unknown
Ican believe anything provided it is incredible. \plain\f4\fs28Oscar Wilde
There are many things that are essential to arriving at true peace of mind, and one of the most important is faith, which cannot be acquired without prayer. -----John Wooden

All truth passes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

My advice to you is:
Get married.
If you find a good wife you'll be happy;
if not, you'll become a philosopher.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown
is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Compare:
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle

It is dangerous to be sincere
unless you are also stupid.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity;
an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters
of Life's longing for itself.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely . . . ; but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude . . . ------ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you
it's going to be a butterfly. ------ Buckminster Fuller

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. ----- William James

There's a fine line between genius and insanity.
I have erased this line. ------ Oscar Levant

You need chaos in your soul
to give birth to a dancing star. -------- Nietzsche

Thank goodness I was never sent to school;
it would have rubbed off some of the originality. ------- Beatrix Potter

The world is but a canvas to the imagination. ----- Henry David Thoreau

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [A Psalm of Life]

Life may be a 'Great Balancing Act',
but through it all,
There's fun to be done.
WOW !
I just stood there
watching that little bird, and wondering
How our creator, GOD the ultimate Architecht,
put so much wonder and beauty into everything:
The detail in a single blade of grass,
the texture in the tree bark,
the colors of natural palette in spring,
the instinct instilled into this little bird to put on a grand performance,
like none Holly-wood has ever seen.
I guess you'd have to have been there
because I can't get it out of my mind.

Earth provides enough
to satisfy every man's need,
but not every man's greed"
There's no cure for birth and death
save to enjoy the interval.
Love truth,
but pardon error

"If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing." Sir James Barrie

"For a long time the only time I felt beautiful in the sense of being
complete as a woman, as a human being, and even female
was when I was singing." Leontyne Price

"Composing a piece of music is very feminine.
It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative." Barbara Kolb

"What we play is life." Louis Armstrong

"A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence." Leopole Stokowski
-----
"The soul of music slumbers in the shell
Till waked and kindled by the master's spell;
And feeling hearts, touch them but rightly, pour
A thousand melodies unheard before!" Samuel Rogers
------
"Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass;
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass." Alfred Noyes
----
"See deep enough, and you see musically;
the heart of nature being everywhere music." Thomas Carlyle
----
"Music expresses that which cannot be said
and on which it is impossible to be silent."
----
"The only explanation for her being a musician
is that she likes to sleep late."
----
"If music be the food of love, play on." Shakespeare
----
MUSIC IS

"An outburst of the soul." Frederick Deluis

"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible." Aldous Huxley

"Love in search of a word." Sidney Lanier

"The universal language of mankind." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Moonlight in the gloomy night of life." Jean Paul Richter

"The art which is most nigh to tears and memory." Oscar Wilde

"What feelings sound like." Anon.

POETRY IS

"When an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found the words." .....................................Robert Frost

"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." Thomas Gray

"All that is worth remembering in life." ......................William Hazlitt

"Plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.".................Dennis Gabor

"My business is to create." ...................William Blake

"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde

Miscellaneous Quotes

"To be successful,
the first thing to do is
fall in love with your work." Sister Mary Lauretta

"True strength is delicate" Louise Nevelson

"If you love what you do,
you'll never work another day in your life."

"O God, Thy sea is so great,
and my boat is so small." ----- prayer of Breton fishermen

"To be nobody but yourself
in a world where everyone is trying their hardest
to make you everyone else,
is the hardest battle you'll ever fight." Anonymous

Wise men talk because they have something to say;
Fools, because they have to say something.

"I dread success.
To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth,
like the male spider, who is killed by the female
the moment he has succeeded in the courtship.
I like a state of continual becoming,
with a goal in front and not behind"

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative
Personal devotion to what a man calls his business
is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things"

I always knew that one day I would take this road, but
yesterday I did not know today would be the day
17th century French mathematician and scientist Blaise Pascal asked the question nearly 350 years ago.
And it jumps off the page with as much power today as when he first penned it:

"When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after [it] . . .
I take fright.
Who put me here?
By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?"

Only two things are infinite,
the universe and human stupidity,
and I'm not sure about the former.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown
is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
The real voyage of discovery consists
not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes"...marcel Proust

"Out of clutter, find simplicity"...Albert Einstein

"I know a bird can fly, a fish can swim, and an animal can run.
For that which runs, a net can be fashioned;
for that which swims, a line can be strung.
But the ascent of a Dragon on the wind into heaven
is something that is beyond my knowledge" ...Confucius

"In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Martin L King

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect
has intended us to forego their use. " - Galileo Galilei

"Don't be so humble -
you are not that great. " - Golda Meir to a visiting diplomat

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly,
while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Plato

"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome." - Isaac Asimov

"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens." - Jimi Hendrix

"There are people in the world so hungry,
that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. " - John F. Kennedy

"I am become death, shatterer of worlds. " - Robert J. Oppenheimer (citing from the Bhagavadgita,

"If you always do what you always did -
you'll always get what you always got"...unknown

The curious paradox is that
when I accept myself just as I am,
then I can change:... Carl Rogers

"Waking thoughts and sleeping dreams are both equally illusionary.
The Wise pay little attention to either"... Lao Tzu

Asceticism is not that you should not own anything,
but that nothing should own you"...........................Ali Ibn Abu Talib

"It is indeed misery if I stretch an empty hand to men and receive nothing;
but it is hopelessness if I stretch a full hand and find none to receive."
...Kahlil gibran

Do have desires; but be careful that
the desires don't have you............................................Anonymous

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: OLD PATTERNS ARE RUTS, NEW ONES ARE IDEAS
Creativity expert Michael Michalko gives this explanation of his fascination with Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution and the attempts of scholars to apply Darwinian ideas to creativity and genius:

"I first became interested in Darwin in college when I read about Darwin's experience with John Gould. When Darwin returned to England after he visited the Galapagos, he distributed his finch specimens to professional zoologists to be properly identified. One of the most distinguished experts was John Gould. What was the most revealing was not what happened to Darwin, but what had not happened to Gould.

"Darwin's notes show Gould taking him through all the birds he had named. Gould kept flip-flopping back and forth about the number of different species of finches: The information was there, but he didn't quite know what to make of it. He assumed that since God made one set of birds when he created the world, the specimens from different locations would be identical. It didn't occur to him to look for differences by location. Gould thought that the birds were so different that they might be distinct
species.

"What was remarkable to me about the encounter is the completely different impact it had on the two men. Gould thought the way he had been taught to think, like an expert taxonomist, and didn't see, in the finches, the textbook example of evolution unfolding right before him. Darwin didn't even know they were finches. So the guy who had the intelligence, knowledge, and the expertise didn't see the differences, and the guy with far less knowledge and expertise came up with an idea that shaped the way we think about the world.

"Darwin came up with the idea because he was a productive thinker. He generated a multiplicity of perspectives and theories. Gould would compare new ideas and theories with his existing patterns of experience. He thought reproductively. If the ideas didn't fit with what he had been taught, he rejected them as worthless. On the other hand, Darwin was willing to disregard what past thinkers thought and was willing to entertain different perspectives and different theories to see where they would lead. "Most of us are educated to think like John Gould. We were all born to be spontaneous, creative thinkers. Yet a great deal of our education may be regarded as the inculcation of mind-sets. We were taught how to handle problems and new phenomena with fixed mental attitudes (based on what past thinkers thought) that predetermine our responses to problems or situations.

In short, we were taught 'what' to think instead of 'how' to think. We entered school as a question mark and graduated a period."
[From Michael Michalko, "Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius," Ten Speed Press, 1998]

Be Aware:

The pleasures of life were not consumed by us;
it is we that have been consumed by the pleasures.

A penance was not performed by us;
we have merely suffered the pain of the penance.

Time has not passed by us;
We have been carried away by time
(without our consent and away from our goals).

Our longings have not been fulfilled or exhausted;
we have been wasted by our longings.
from Bhartruhari's Three shatakas.

A shataka = 100 stanzas. The three shatakas are:
Neethi shataka (Ethics and practical wisdom;
Sringara shataka(Love);
Vairaagya shataka (Detachment).

A simlar quote on Time:
From: Pcket Book of Quotations -

Time goes, you say?
Ah no !
Alas, Time stays, we go Austin Dobson, The Paradox of Time.

The well of certitude within us:
The realization forces itself through my wonderment that all my questions are moves in an endless game, the play of thoughts which possess no limit to their extent; that somewhere within me there is a well of certitude which can provide me with all the waters of truth I require; and that it will be better to cease my questioning and attempt to realize the tremendous potencies of my own spiritual nature." ....
Brunton complained to Ramana Maharishi that the path was full of difficulties and that he was acutely conscious of his own weakness. The Maharishi replied:
"That is the surest way to handicap oneself - this burdening of one's mind with the fear of future and the thought of one's failings.........The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself."
Paul Brunton in "A Search in Secret India" (Page 280)