What Are You Doing With Your Life?

If you merely escape mental pain and confusion with drugs, entertainment, sex, busy-ness, the painful problem is still there, compounded with exhaustion and addiction.

Attention to the ways of the self, understanding that fear, desire, and anger are natural but that you don’t have to act them out or have everything you want—this insight dissolves mental anguish without adding to it.

We are trying to find out what is happiness and whether happiness is something of which you are conscious. The moment you are conscious that you are happy, that you have much, is that happiness? The moment you are conscious that you are happy, it is not happiness, is it? So you cannot go after happiness. The moment you are conscious that you are hu

Self-knowledge is obviously a process, not an end in itself; and to know oneself, one must be aware of oneself in action, which is relationship. You discover yourself, not in isolation, not in withdrawal, but in relationship—in relationship to society, to your wife, your husband, your brother, to man; but to discover how you react, what your respon

Someone else’s truth sounds like only opinion until you try it out for yourself. You must look through the microscope yourself, or you will be left with the dust of words, not the actual perception of life.

There is a search for something permanent, is there not, in most of us?—something we can cling to, something which will give us assurance, a hope, a lasting enthusiasm, a lasting certainty, because in ourselves we are so uncertain. We do not know ourselves. We know a lot about facts, what the books have said; but we do not know for ourselves, we do

The conflict-ridden violent world cannot be transformed into a life of goodness, love, and compassion by any political, social, or economic strategies. It can be transformed only through mutation in individuals brought about through their own observation without any guru or organized religion.

Our minds are conditioned, held, tethered to dogma, to belief, to experience, to knowledge. With this tethered mind, with this mind that is so conditioned, so heavily held, we meet life, which is in constant movement. Life, with its many complex and swiftly changing problems, is never still, and it requires a fresh approach every day, every minute.

That happiness cannot be made permanent, in the sense in which we use that word. But, our mind is seeking permanent happiness, something that will last, that will continue. That very desire for continuity is corruption.