Great Throughts Treasury

"Truth has no tradition, it cannot be handed down."

"Truth is the unknown, and a mind that is seeking truth will never find it, for mind is made up of the known"

"For the discovery of truth there is no path. You must enter the uncharted sea."

"Truth can only come to the mind that is empty of the known. It comes in a state in which the known is absent, not functioning."

"Introspection, which is a form of self-improvement, of self-expansion, can never lead to truth, because it is always a process of self-enclosure; whereas awareness is a state in which truth can come into being, the truth of what is, the simple truth of daily existence. It is only when we understand the truth of daily existence that we can go far. You must begin near to go far but most of us want to jump, to begin far without understanding what is close. As we understand the near, we shall find the distance between the near and the far is not. There is no distance - the beginning and the end are one."

"Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real."

"There is no path to truth. There is not your path or my path. There is no Christian way to it, or Hindu way to it. A 'way' implies a static process to something which is also static. There is a way from here to that next village, the village is firmly there, rooted in the buildings, and there is a road to it. But truth is not like that, it is a living thing, a moving thing and therefore there can be no path to it, neither yours nor mine nor theirs."

"The man who is seeking comfort does not want truth; he only wants security, safety, a refuge in which he will not be disturbed. But a man who is seeking truth must invite disturbances, tribulations because it is only in moments of crisis that there is alertness, watchfulness, action. Then only that which is is discovered and understood."

"Truth can come to you only when your mind and heart are simple, clear, and there is love in your heart, not if your heart is filled with the things of the mind. When there is love in your heart, you do not talk about organizing for brotherhood, you do not talk about belief, you do not talk about division or the powers that create division, you need not seek reconciliation. Then you are a simple human being without a label, without a country. This means that you must strip yourself of all those things and allow truth to come into being, and it can come only when the mind is empty, when the mind ceases to create. Then it will come without your invitation. Then it will come as swiftly as the wind and unbeknown. It comes obscurely, not when you are watching, wanting. It is there as sudden as sunlight, as pure as the night, but to receive it, the heart must be full and the mind empty."

"So can you see the fact of violence—the fact not only outside of you but also inside you—and not have any time interval between listening and acting? This means by the very act of listening you are free from violence. You are totally free from violence because you have not admitted time, an ideology through which you can get rid of violence. This requires very deep meditation, not just a verbal agreement or disagreement. We never listen to anything; our minds, our brain cells are so conditioned to an ideology about violence that we never look at the fact of violence. We look at the fact of violence through an ideology, and the looking at violence through an ideology creates a time interval. And when you admit time, there is no end to violence; you go on showing violence, preaching non-violence."

"Do not think by merely wishing for peace, you will have peace, when in your daily life of relationship you are aggressive, acquisitive, seeking psychological security here or in the hereafter. You have to understand the central cause of conflict and sorrow and then dissolve it and not merely look to the outside for peace."

"It is not that you must be free from fear. The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create a resistance against fear. Resistance, in any form,does not end fear. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it through courage and so on. "

"All knowledge is of the past, is it not? Knowledge can never be of the now, it is always receding into the past. Knowledge is static; you may add more to it, but it is a dead thing."

"Any form of becoming is an illusion, and becoming implies kind, time for the psyche to change."

"Attachment to a belief is part of the desire to be secure, and the desire and demand for psychological security in any form brings about this atrophying of the brain."

"Attention is a state of mind in which there is no contradiction? It is a state in which there is no wastage of energy, whereas in concentration always the controlling process going on? Concentration has a relationship to thought: thought directs: ?I must learn, I must concentrate in order to control myself.?"

"Be aware choice Sisley of outward things? The inward in the outward are not two different things."

"Because compassion is related to intelligence, there?s no intelligence without compassion. And compassion can only be when there is love completely free from all remembrances, personal jealousies, and so on? You cannot be compassionate if you are attached to any particular experience or any particular ideal."

"Can thought investigate the immeasurable, the unknown, the unnameable, the eternal, the everlasting? Thought certain with remembering, imagining, contriving, designing, calculating, and therefore functioning from a center, which is the accumulated knowledge as the ?me?, can that thought investigate something which it cannot possibly understand? Because it can only function in the field of the known; otherwise thought is puzzled, is incapable."

"Can you and your attachment? And it, not argue about it, and it in see what happens. You and all things like greed, envy, anxiety, loneliness, now, death has a totally different meaning. Then there is no death, you are living with death all the time. That is life, ending is a beginning. If you keep the same thing going on continuously, there is nothing new. Only when there is an ending does a flowering take place? There is an actual facing of nothing, which is death, would buy death while living. That invitation is the ending of all your attachments. Then out of all this comes a strange factor, the factor of supreme intelligence. That intelligence is based on compassion and clarity, and because of that intelligence there is great skill."

"Contact can only exist between the mind and the brain of the brain is quiet? Quiet is not a trained quietness, not a self-conscious, meditative, desire for silence. This a natural outcome of understanding one?s own conditioning."

"Each one of us can be creative in the deep sense of that word ? not an expression, that is, in writing a book, home, or whatever it is, but having insight and never drawing a conclusion from that insight, you are moving constantly from inside insight, action to action. That is spontaneity."

"How is the mind to bring about a harmony in which the division between the known and freedom from the known doesn?t exist? The known as knowledge, the functioning of thought, and freedom from it. The two moving together, in perfect harmony, balance, the beauty of movement? Integration means putting several parts together, adding new parts, or taking wailed part; that implies an entity capable of doing this, an outsider who is the invention of thought. Like the soul, the hot month in India, and so on, it is still thought. So my question is: can there be like to rivers joining together, moving together, the known and the unknown, the freedom from the known, in the mind that has inside into a dimension in which thought doesn?t happen at all?"

"I am beginning to see the extraordinary nature of our own deception and dishonesty. The great deal of hypocrisy in us. We can never see things as they are but must create illusions about them? Constant choice lists awareness Ann?s all allusions and all hypocrisy."

"I may say, I love my wife, but it is not the actual fact. I love the image which I have about her is not attacking discovered that relationship means freedom from images, conclusions; and therefore means responsibility and love."

"Intelligence is not the clever pursuit of argument, of opposing contradictions, opinions ? as though opinions truth can be found, which is impossible ? but it is to realize that the activity of thought, with all its capacities, subtleties and extraordinary ceaseless activity, is not intelligence."

"Intelligence is the understanding or discovering of what love is. Intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with thought, his cleverness, with knowledge."

"Is totally relevant is what is now, with you can alter the way you live now."

"Knowledge is absolutely essential. You can add to it, take away from it, but the immensity of knowledge is a human necessity. Now is knowledge necessary in relationship between human beings?... Relationship means to be related, relationship means to respond to each other in freedom, with its responsibility. So what place has thought in relationship? Thought, which is capable of remembering, imagining, contriving, designing, calculating: what place has a human relationship? Has it anyplace at all?"

"Learning means instant perception, therefore learning does not require time."

"Memory is the past, which is of time. And so when the brain operates, whether psychologically, socially, economically, or religiously, it must invariably operate in terms of time, the past according to its conditioning? The brain is the result of time, and therefore the past, and with all that structure of thought is in operation it cannot possibly see the whole, so what is it that sees life as a whole, not broken up into fragments?... It is only a mind and a heart and the brain which are broken up his fragments that create problems. The center of this fragment is the ?me?. The ?me? is brought about through thought, which has no reality by itself."

"Memory is thought. And knowledge, however wide, however deep, however extensive, must always be limited. There is no complete knowledge. Thought is always partial, Limited, divisive, because in itself it isn?t complete, it can never be complete; it can think about completeness, it can think about totality, the whole, but thought itself is not whole? As knowledge can never be complete, it must always go hand in hand with ignorance."

"Mind must have knowledge? Knowledge is necessary to function in the mechanical world? There is no contradiction between knowledge and freedom from knowledge when there is an inside? When you have constant insight with that conclusion, that state of mind is created ? not the mind that is in conflict and through conflict produces pictures, books. That mind can never be creative."

"Perception is when there is observation without a movement of thought, when there is absolute silence of memory, time, is thought? When you so watch without prejudice, then there is freedom from that which has been."

"Security is in the insight which brings intelligence. Security is intelligence. It is not knowledge, not experience, but insight into the value of knowledge that is the capacity of sustained intelligence, and in that there is security. Therefore that intelligence, that insight is never frightened."

"Self-education is the beginning of wisdom ? not in books, not in somebody else, but in the understanding of our own selfish, narrow, distorted activity is going on day after day, day after day."

"So thinking is the response of the background, of the past, of accumulated experience; it is the response of memory at different levels, both individual and collective, particular interracial, conscious and unconscious. All that is our process of thinking. Therefore our thinking can never be new."

"Social morality is based on pleasure, and therefore it is no morality at all, it is immoral."

"The concept of an individual makes as much more selfish, self-centered, neurotic, and competitive; competition also is destroying man. So the world is you, and you are the world. That is a marvelous feeling, if you really understand it. There was great vitality, perception, immense beauty in it. Not the mere beauty of painting, a poem, or lovely face. But we are the world, and that, me."

"The crisis is not in politics, in governments, whether totalitarian or so-called democratic, the crisis is not among the scientist nor among established respectable relations. The crisis is in our consciousness, as in our minds, our hearts, our behavior, a relationship. In the crisis cannot be understood fully, and perhaps meant totally, unless we understand the nature and structure of consciousness, together my thought. So we are learning, or observing our own state of mind. That?s where real education, self-education, begins."

"The innermost depths of the self is absolutely not ? a ? thing. And the beauty, the greatness, the magnitude of love is only possible thought realize it has no place in relationship ? and therefore love is."

"The mind is separate from the brain? Separate in the sense that the brain?s condition and the mind is not."

"The moment there was thought about the unknown, the mind is agitated; it is always seeking to bring the unknown into the known. But the unknown can never be brought into the known, and hence the conflict between the known and the unknown."

"The outward world in the inward world are put together by thought. Thought this material process."

"The self is a problem that thought cannot resolve. There must be an awareness which is not of thought. To be aware, without combination or justification, of the activities of the self ? just to be aware ? is sufficient."

"There is no security and belief, in a conclusion, and any person, in any social structure, in any leader, in following anybody... There is security and inside, not in conclusion."

"There is no such thing as living in isolation. The understanding of the process of rethinking comes with me observe ourselves in daily relationship, or attitudes, our beliefs? The very existence of the mind implies relationship, and self-knowledge lies to seeing the facts of relationship as they are without inventing, condemning, or just fine? The mind can just be aware of this whole process, you will find that thought comes to a standstill. Then the mind is very quiet, very still, without incentive, without movement in any direction, and in that stillness reality comes into being."

"Thinking is a reaction."

"Thinking is the response of memory, experience, knowledge stored up in the brain cells. Therefore thought is the result of development, evolution, which is time. So thought is the result of time, and it can function only within the space it creates around itself. In that space is very limited, that space is the ?me? and ?not you.?"

"Thought ? when I have to build the bridge, write a book, make a speech, calculate Russia go ? I use thought. And in relationship no thought at all, because that is love."