Without an integrated understanding of life, our individual and collective problems will only deepen and extend. The purpose of education isn't to produce mere scholars, technicians and job hunters, but integrated men and women who are free of fear; for only between such human beings can there be enduring peace.
The unknown is not measurable by the known. Time cannot measure the timeless, the eternal, that immensity which has no beginning and no end... when we try to measure something which is not measurable, we only get caught in words.
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 long as the mind is in conflict-blaming, resisting, condemning-there can be no understanding. If I want to understand you, I must not condemn you, obviously.
In this country, unfortunately, as all over the world, we care so little, we have no deep feeling about anything. Most of us are intellectual-intellectuals in the superficial sense of being very clever, full of words and theories about what is right and what is wrong, about how we should think, what we should do. Mentally we are highly developed, but inwardly there is very little substance or significance; and it is this inward substance that brings about true action, which is not action according to an idea.
A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect ... Your have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
You yourself are the teacher, and the pupil, you're the master, you're the guru, you are the leader, you are everything! And, to understand is to transform what is.
There is no such thing as living alone, for all living is relationship; but to live without direct relationship demands high intelligence, a swifter and greater awareness for self-discovery.
A mind that is disciplined, controlled, is free within its own pattern; but that is not freedom. The end of discipline is conformity; its path leads to the known, and the known is never the free.
Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.