I have an implicit faith ... that mankind can only be saved through non-violence, which is the central teaching of the Bible, as I have understood the Bible.
Power depends ultimately on physical force. By teaching people that violence is wrong (except, of course, when the system itself uses violence via the police or the military), the system maintains its monopoly on physical force and thus keeps all power in its own hands.
The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.
If you listen to the Dhamma teachings but don't practice you're like a ladle in a soup pot. The ladle is in the soup pot every day, but it doesn't know the taste of the soup. You must reflect and meditate.
That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories.
Yoga means to bind back, unite. To bring the body and the soul together. For this reason the practice of yoga is a holy endeavor and the teaching of it to our people a very high calling.
Inspiration is a slender river of brightness leaping from a vast and eternal knowledge, it exceeds reason more perfectly than reason exceeds the knowledge of the senses.
I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
His students were hardly in a position to tell him when he was getting windy, and he had recently noticed, as most professors did after a while, that his lectures mysteriously seemed to be getting longer with time.