“Maybe you’re right, boss. It all depends on the way you look at it. . . . Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandad!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned round and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?”
If one changes internally, one should not continue to live with the same objects. They reflect one’s mind and psyche of yesterday. I throw away what has no dynamic, living use. I keep nothing to remind me of the passage of time, deterioration, loss, shriveling.
You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.
Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we drank it, itself as yet unknown.
Don Juan assured me that in order to accomplish the feat of making myself miserable I had to work in a most intense fashion, and that it was absurd. I had now realized I could work just the same in making myself complete and strong. “The trick is in what one emphasizes,” he said. “We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”
Do you really believe that you understand the ruling of the Divine Law and what makes action pious and impious, so accurately, that in the circumstances that you describe you have no misgivings?
Your understandings are of misunderstandings.
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things. To us what matters is the individual. To get to love the person we must come in close contact with him. If we wait till we get the numbers, then we will be lost in the numbers. And we will never be able to show that love and respect for the person. I believe in person to person; every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.
Condemned to go beyond himself continually, man succeeds without being aware of it and does not understand until afterward.
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Men and women can live without air for a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months — and without a new thought for years on end.
Enlightened space, the place of unconditional love, cannot be achieved until and unless one is willing to be comfortable with paradox and confusion.
After changes upon changes we are more or less the same.
