He who learns must suffer. In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Put everything at the stake. Be a gambler!
Risk everything, because the next moment is not certain, so why bother?
Why be concerned? Live dangerously, live joyously.
Live without fear, live without guilt. Live without any fear of hell,
or any greed for heaven. Just live.
Many of our problems — perhaps most of our problems — are because we have never looked face to face, encountered them; and not looking at them is giving them energy. Being afraid of them is giving them energy, always trying to avoid them is giving them energy — because you are accepting them. Your very acceptance is their existence. Other than your acceptance, they don´t exist.
Listening is a deep participation between the body and the soul. And that’s why it has been used as one of the most potential methods for meditation...because it bridges the two infinities: the material and the spiritual.
Whenever you are sitting, just listen — to whatsoever is going on; it is a marketplace and there is much noise and traffic and the train and the plane — listen to it with no rejection in the mind that it is noisy. Listen as if you are listening to music, with sympathy, and suddenly you will see that the quality of the noise has changed. It is no longer distracting, no longer disturbing; on the contrary, it becomes very soothing. If listened to rightly, even the marketplace becomes a melody.
So, what you are listening to is not the point — the point is you are listening, not just hearing.
Even if you are listening to something that you have never thought of as worth listening to, listen to it very cheerfully — as if you are listening to a Beethoven sonata — and suddenly you will see you have transformed the quality of it. It becomes beautiful. And in that listening your ego will disappear.
Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge,
it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again.
No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence.
No-mind is the real way to live,
the real way to know, the real way to be.
And each person is such an infinite mystery, inexhaustible, unfathomable, that it is not possible that ever you can say that "I have known her," or, "I have known him." At the most you can say, "I have tried my best, but the mystery remains a mystery." In fact the more you know, the more mysterious the other becomes.
Then love is a constant adventure.
Man is already where he needs to be, where he is meant to be. Man is in paradise. The garden of Eden has never been left, nobody can expel you from it. But you can fall asleep, you can start dreaming a thousand and one things. Then those dreams become your reality, and the reality fades far away, becomes unreal.
....yet to come!
Just sit under a tree. The breeze is blowing and the leaves of the tree are rustling. The wind touches you, it moves around you, it passes. But don’t allow it just to pass you; allow it to move within you and pass through you. Just close your eyes, and as it is passing through the tree and there is a rustling of the leaves, feel that you are also like a tree, open, and the wind is blowing through you ― not by your side but right through you.
The rustling of the tree will enter in you, and you will feel that from every pore of your body the air is passing. It is really passing through you. It is not only imagination, it is a fact ― you have forgotten. You are not only breathing through the nose, you are breathing through the whole body ― from every pore of it, from millions of pores. If you are allowed to breathe through your nose, but all the pores of your body are closed, painted, you will die within three hours. You cannot be alive just by breathing through the nose. Every cell of your body is a living organism, and every cell is breathing. The air is really passing through you, but you have lost the contact. So sit under a tree and feel.
In the beginning it will look like imagination, but soon it will turn into a reality. It is a reality ― that the air is passing through you. Then sit under a rising sun, and not only feel that the rays of the sun are touching you, but that they are entering you and passing through you, so you become vulnerable, you begin to feel open.
The ego is the barrier. When you feel you are, you are so much that nothing can enter in you. You are filled with your own self. When you are not, then everything can pass through you. You have become so vast that even the divine can pass through you. The whole existence is now ready to pass through you, because you are ready. So the whole art of religion is how not to be, how to dissolve, how to surrender, how to become an open space.
Fields of poppies, little pearls
All the boys and all the girls sweet-toothed
Each and every one a little scary
I wore it like a badge of teenage film stars
Hash bars, cherry mash and tinfoil tiaras
Dreaming of Maria Callas
Whoever she is
This fame thing, I don't get it
I wrap my hand in plastic to try to look through it
Maybelline eyes and girl-as-boy moves
I can take you far
This star thing, I don't get it
Will you live to 83?
Will you ever welcome me?
Will you show me something that nobody else has seen?
Smoke it, drink
Here comes the flood
Anything to thin the blood
These corrosives do their magic slowly and sweet
Phone, eat it, drink
Just another chink
Cuts and dents, they catch the light
Aluminum, the weakest link
I don't want to disappoint you
I'm not here to anoint you
I would lick your feet
But is that the sickest move?
I wear my own crown and sadness and sorrow
And who'd have thought tomorrow could be so strange?
My loss
Look up, what do you see?
All of you and all of me
Fluorescent and starry
Some of them, they surprise
I can't look it in the eyes
Seconal, Spanish fly, absinthe, kerosene
Cherry-flavored neck and collar
I can smell the sorrow on your breath
The sweat, the victory and sorrow
The smell of fear, I got it.
Aluminum, tastes like fear
Adrenaline, it pulls us near