"Life is nothing but relationship. Though we attempt to isolate
ourselves from relationship, we cannot exist without it. Though
relationship is painful we cannot run away, by means of isolation
by becoming a hermit and so on. All these methods are indications
of the activity of the self."

"Truth can exist only, when the self is not."

The Art of Listening with your Whole Being

"There is an art of listening. To be able really to listen, one should abandon or put aside all prejudices, pre-formulations and daily activities. When you are in receptive state of mind, things can be easily understood; you are listening when your real attention is given to something. But unfortunately most of us listen through a screen of resistance. We are screened with prejudices, whether religious or spiritual, psychological or scientific; or with our daily worries, desires and fears. And with these for a screen, we listen. Therefore, we listen really to our  own noise, to our own sound, not to what is being said."

"When I say, 'Nationalism is poison', how do you listen to it?
Do you listen with your prejudices? To feel nationalistic is
so thrilling, and you also consider it extremely important.
Therefore when I say that it is poison, you do not listen at
all. When you resist something which another is saying, you will
not be listening."

"When you compare what is being said  to what the Buddha or Jesus or Shankara have said, then you are not listening."

The understanding of oneself is from moment to moment

"Before we can find out what the end purpose of life is, what it all means - wars, national antagonisms, conflicts, the whole mess - we must begin with ourselves, must we not? It sounds so simple, but it is extremely difficult. To follow oneself, to see how one's thought operates, one has to be extraordinarily alert,
so that one begins to be more and more alert to the intricacies of one's own thinking and responses and feelings, one begins to have a greater awareness, not only of oneself but of another with whom one is related. To know oneself is to study oneself in action, which is relationship."

"The understanding of what you are, whatever it be - ugly or
beautiful, wicked or mischievous - the understanding of what
you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue
is essential, for it gives freedom."

"In the moment of experiencing, you are not aware of yourself as the experiencer apart from the experience; you are in a state of experiencing. Take a very simple example: you are angry. In that moment of anger there is neither the experiencer
nor the experience; there is only experiencing. But the moment you come out of it, a split second after the experiencing, there is the experiencer and the experience, the actor and the action with an end in view - which is to get rid of anger or to suppress that anger. We are repeatedly in this state of experiencing; but we always come out of it and give it a term, naming and recording it, and thereby giving continuity to becoming."

"It is a very interesting thing to watch how in our lives these two, knowledge and belief, play an extraordinarily powerful part. Look how we worship those who have immense knowledge and erudition! Can you understand the meaning of it? If you would find something new, experience something which is not a projection of your imagination, your mind must be free, must  it not? It must be capable of seeing something new. Unfortunately, every time you see something new you bring in all the information known to you already, all your knowledge, all your past memories; and obviously you become incapable of looking, incapable of receiving anything that is new, that is not of the old."

"I feel that to see what is true from moment to moment, without any effort, but directly to experience it, is the only creative existence."
 

The Desire for God or Drink is the same

"Contradiction arises only when the mind has a fixed point of desire; that is when the mind does not regard all desire as moving, transient, but seizes upon one desire and makes that into a permanency - only then, when other desires arise, is
there contradiction. But all desires are in constant movement, there is no fixation of desire. There is no fixed point in desire; but the mind establishes a fixed point because it treats everything as a means to arrive, to gain; and there must
be contradiction, conflict as long as one is arriving. You want to arrive, you want to succeed, you want to find an ultimate God or Truth which will be your permanent satisfaction. Therefore you are not seeking truth, you are not seeking God. You are seeking lasting gratification, and that gratification you clothe with an idea, a respectable-sounding word such as God, Truth; but actually we are all seeking gratification, and we place that gratification, that satisfaction, at the highest point, calling it God, and the lowest point drink. So long as the mind is seeking gratification, there is not much difference between God and drink. Socially, drink may be bad; but the inward desire for gratification, for gain, is even more harmful is it not? If you really want to find truth, you must be extremely
honest, not merely at the verbal level but altogether; you must be extraordinarily clear, and you cannot be clear if you are unwilling to face facts."

Total Negation is the Essence of the Positive
 

"Man, in order to escape his conflicts, has invented many forms of meditation. These have been based on desire, will and the urge for achievement and imply conflict and a struggle to arrive. This conscious, deliberate striving is always within the limits of a conditioned mind and in this there is no freedom. All effort to meditate is the denial of meditation. Meditation is the ending of thought. It is only then that there is a different dimension which is beyond time."

"I do not know if you have ever noticed that when you give total attention, there is complete silence. And in that attention, there is no frontier, no centre, as the "me" who is aware or attentive. That attention, that silence, is a state of meditation."

"When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence."

Meditation

"Meditation is the destruction of thought and not thought caught
 in its own intricacies, visions and its own vain pursuits.
 Thought shattering itself against its own nothingness is the
 explosion of meditation."

"Meditation is the understanding of consciousness,

the hidden and the open,

and of the movement that lies beyond

all thought and feeling."