Though we are all human beings, we have built walls between ourselves and our neighbors through nationalism, through race, caste, and class - which again breeds isolation, loneliness.
If you have a great many desires, you will gradually eliminate them one by one, until you allow certain desires to dominate and the others to die away.
As the beauty of the picture depends not on the painter but on the picture itself, what I say must depend on its own intrinsic value and not on the authority of my attainment, nor on the authority of others.
And as we are - the world is. That is, if we are greedy, envious, competitive, our society will be competitive, envious, greedy, which brings misery and war. The State is what we are.
The first thing to realize in meditation is that there is no authority, that the mind must be completely free to examine, to observe, to learn. And so there is no following, no accepting, no obedience.
You know, in the case of most of us, the mind is noisy, everlastingly chattering to itself, soliloquizing or chattering about something, or trying to talk to itself, to convince itself of something; it is always moving, noisy.
The fact is there is nothing that you can trust; and that is a terrible fact, whether you like it or not. Psychologically there is nothing in the world, that you can put your faith, your trust, or your belief in. Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.
Without love there is no art. When the artist is playing beautifully there is no 'me; there is love and beauty, and this is art. This is skill in action.
There you have the two extremes: the man that is concerned mainly with the hidden life, and the man who seriously concerns himself with the expression of that life. What I want to do is to bring about harmony between the two extremes, for therein lies the Truth. The harmony of life is the understanding of Truth.
The earth doesn't belong to anyone. It is the land upon which all of us are to live for many years, ploughing, reaping and destroying. You are always a guest on this earth and have the austerity of a guest. Austerity is far deeper than owning only a few things. The very word austerity has been spoilt by the monks, by the sannyasis, by the hermits. Sitting on that high hill alone in the solitude of many things, many rocks and little animals and ants, that word has no meaning.
A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.