Цитаты из книги Freedom from the Known

Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been a favorite game of escape.

Each one of us is the storehouse of all the past. The individual is the human who is all mankind. The whole history of man is written in ourselves.

You have now started by denying something absolutely false - the traditional approach - but if you deny it as a reaction you will have created another pattern in which you will be trapped; if you tell yourself intellectually that this denial is a very good idea but do nothing about it, you cannot go any further.

The observer is fear and when that is realized there is no longer any dissipation of energy in the effort to get rid of fear, and the time-space interval between the observer and the observed disappears. When you see that you are a part of fear, not separate from it - that you are fear - then you cannot do anything about it; then fear comes totally to an end.

The saint who seeks a position in regard to his saintliness is as aggressive as the chicken pecking in the farmyard.

Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure.

Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.

It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same, as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you

Awareness is like living with a snake in the room; you watch its every movement, you are very, very sensitive to the slightest sound it makes. Such a state of attention is total energy; in such awareness the totality of yourself is revealed in an instant.

It is one of the most difficult things in the world to look at anything simply.

Understanding is not an intellectual process. Accumulating knowledge about yourself and learning about yourself are two different things

It rained last night heavily, and now the skies are beginning to clear; it is a new fresh day. Let us meet that fresh day as if it were the only day. Let us start on our journey together with all the remembrance of yesterday left behind - and begin to understand ourselves for the first time.

To understand ourselves needs no authority either of yesterday or of a thousand years because we are living things, always moving, flowing, never resting. When we look at ourselves with the dead authority of yesterday, we will fail to understand the living movement and the beauty and quality of that movement.

There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom. You are free and from that centre you act.

Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self. To understand yourself is the beginning of wisdom.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

When we demand an experience of reality - as we all do, don't we? - to experience it we must know it and the moment we recognise it we have already projected it and therefore it is not real because it is still within the field of thought and time. If thought can think about reality it cannot be reality. We cannot recognize a new experience. It is impossible. We recognize only something we have already known and therefore when we say we have had a new experience it is not new at all.

A living mind is a still mind, a living mind is a mind that has no centre and therefore no space and time. Such a mind is limitless and that is the only truth, that is the only reality.

Thought can never solve any psychological problem. However clever, however cunning, however erudite, whatever the structure thought creates through science, through an electronic brain, through compulsion or necessity, thought is never new and therefore it can never answer any tremendous question. The old brain cannot solve the enormous problem of living.