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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited July 2023
Q: How did you come to have such a gloomy view of the world?
UG: I was surrounded by all kinds of religious people. I felt that there was something funny in their behavior. There was a wide gap between what they believed and how they lived. This always bothered me. But I could not call all of them hypocrites. I said to myself, "There is something wrong with what they believe. Maybe their source is wrong. All the teachers of mankind, particularly the spiritual teachers, conned themselves and conned the whole of mankind. So, I have to find out for myself, and I have no way of finding out anything for myself as long as I depend upon anyone."
I found that whatever I wanted was what they [the religious people] wanted me to want. Whatever I thought was whatever they wanted me to think. So there was no way out of this. Somewhere along the line something hit me: "There is nothing there to be transformed, nothing there to be changed. There is no mind there, nor is there any self to realize. What the hell am I doing?"
(Question asked of U. G. Krishnamurti)
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: U.G., I would like to probe into the very essence of your revolutionary and uncompromising statement that there is no soul.
A: There is no self, there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind.
Entrepreneur and writer Nat Eliason on the importance of challenging yourself to do hard things:
"The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.
Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.
If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.
But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations.
The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.
When in a tunnel and you see the light, you must ask yourself, "Is that the sunlight or a train?".
-- Anonymous
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“All religions are prisons, Hinduism or Buddhism or Christianity. But by changing prisons you do not achieve individual freedom. That is why I don’t want my people to be members of any organisation. Because if there is no freedom, there cannot be any spiritual growth.”
— Osho
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.”
— Osho
"The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you. We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you are looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts." ~Alan Watts~...
2
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Nature, people, birth and death and all our struggles, our fears and our desires are contained in unconditional love and are a reflection of it.”
— Tony Parsons
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“I suddenly saw that the real meaning of forgiveness is that there is absolutely no one and nothing to forgive. It doesn't matter how often you seem to be wrong, or what you do or don't do. It doesn't matter how much you look for or not. There is only this being. It's unconditional love.”
— Tony Parsons
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Because from the moment we get separated we think that's wrong, and that we are 'wrong'. From the moment we get separated, seemingly dualism appears. 'Is there a place called paradise or wholeness anywhere else? Why am I not in wholeness? Something is wrong, and if something is wrong then something must also be good. So I have to find something good to make up for what's wrong again. So I'm going to be a Buddhist or whatever.' As soon as that is there, the whole drama of good and evil breaks loose.
You then get cause and effect, good and evil, karma and reincarnation, time, space, separation, path - all those things that reinforce that so important idea that I am an individual and that somewhere there is a place better than this one. If you look at all religions, they are about a place that is better than this one. They all deny in all possible voices that this is it.”
— Tony Parsons
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society ~Jiddu Krishnamurti~
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited August 2023
Q: I have read that if you become enlightened or become free, there will be peace and joy and bliss.
A: It's a way to sell something. You know, the whole enlightenment story is about 'you' getting something, and the ironic thing is that enlightenment is about loss. It's about there being no 'you'. There are a lot of teachers who claim to start from that idea. They start by saying, 'There is only unity. No one can do anything to be enlightened. It goes beyond everything - but what you have to do in the preparatory period to find out is meditate or do self-examination.'... or whatever is in their booklet. You need to prepare yourself for the discovery that there is no one and that you cannot prepare for anything.
(Question asked of Tony Parsons)
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“As man becomes more civilized, he becomes potentially more mad. One who is uncivilized is potentially less mad because he still understands the language of the body, he still cooperates with it. His body is not suppressed; his body is the flowering of his being.”
— Osho
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
Q: ARE YOU SAYING THAT MARRIAGE CANNOT BE SPIRITUAL?
A: It cannot be. Marriage can never be spiritual because it is a fixed thing. But I have used marriage just as an example. In fact, the whole of society can never be spiritual because it is based on rules. Rules are always serious; you cannot be playful about them.
When Bodhidharma reached China, he put one shoe on his head and the other on his foot. The emperor asked, ”What are you doing? What nonsense!”
Bodhidharma said, ”I am joking.”
The emperor said, ”But we never expected a joking, laughing sadhu.”
Bodhidharma said, ”How is it possible for a sadhu to be serious? God is not serious, he is so unceasingly playful!”
Creativity comes out of playfulness; hence so much creativity is born out of satori.
(Question asked of Osho)
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The desire for inner knowledge, the desire for this experience or that experience, is part and parcel of the seriousness disease. The serious mind even tries to categorize religious experience; it wants to become the authority: ”I have inner knowledge. I know, and you don’t know. I will teach you.” Again, the mind is attempting to recreate the pattern of the serious society. Do you see it? Religious societies have been created only for this purpose. Sects, ashrams, monasteries, etcetera, are alternative societies.
But the spiritual person is always playful. His life is just play, he is not serious about anything that he does.”
— Osho
"That which knows, is never an object of its own knowledge"
~Shankara~ (a repeat)
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Whenever it happens that a scientist turns to poetry, or a poet turns to mathematics, or a businessman turns to painting, or a painter becomes a sannyasin, then something new is born. And to give birth to something new is blissful; otherwise your daily work becomes dull and boring. Man cannot work like a machine – he cannot go on just producing the same things mechanically, repeating the same routine endlessly. If he goes on doing this, he will be completely dead long before he dies. He will only know that he has been alive when death comes.”
— Osho
"If you always do what you have always done...You will always get what you have always got"
~Henry Ford~
2
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited August 2023
“We are born not knowing who we are, we don't know how to think. We only know how to feel. It is through our feelings that how we are raised creates the trajectory for our future lives.”
— Natasha Khazanov
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“From a wellness perspective, our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalized demonstration of what can go awry. Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
1
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment.
Byron Katie
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“You can only be afraid of what you think you know.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
0
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. ... The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” - Alan Watts
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“So I have been carrying a heavy weight on me, on my heart. My health has been destroyed for many reasons; the most important is this, that I have been speaking on people with whom I do not agree at all. I disagree – not only disagree, but I find them basically psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic, anti-life. All these religions in the past are anti-life. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.
Hence, I say my religion is the first religion which takes man in his totality, in his naturalness, accepts man’s whole, as he is. And that’s what holy means to me – not something sacred, but something accepted in its wholeness. Perhaps things are a little bit upside down and you have to put them in place; just like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to put them in place. And then out of that wholeness arises religious consciousness.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Christianity accepts only one life. In one life how many sins can you commit? If you continuously commit sins day and night for seventy years, from the first day to the last you go on like a chain- sinner, then too eternal punishment cannot be justified. Eternal punishment... forever? There will be no end to it! And I don’t think you commit sins continuously every moment. A man may be committing a few sins... may go to a jail for four years, five years; it may be justified. But eternal hell? So they are exploiting your fear: fear of hell and greed for pleasure in heaven. That has been their total pattern of working on the human mind. I want to say to you that they are only so-called religions. They are not religions at all.
This is the first religion. I don’t promise you any heaven, and I don’t make you afraid of any hell; there is none. I don’t say, ”You have to follow me, then only can you be saved.” That is absolutely egoistic. Jesus says, ”Come, follow me.” Even my book on Jesus is titled Come Follow Me. That is not my statement, it is Jesus’ statement. If you ask me I will say, ”Never! Don’t follow me, because I am myself lost. Unless you choose to be lost forever like me... then it is okay.” To me, anybody claiming any kind of superiority, and you have to follow him – it is a fascist attitude.
My sannyasins are not my followers but my fellow travelers, my friends, my lovers.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The very idea of following makes me sick. It is sickening. You have to be yourself, and when you blossom, you are not going to be like me or like Jesus or like Buddha. You are going to be just like you: you have never happened before, and you are not going to happen again. It is only possible with you. You are unrepeatable. If you start following somebody you are missing a great opportunity that existence has provided for you, and you will never be happy. No Christian is happy, no Hindu is happy, no Buddhist is happy; they cannot be. How can you be happy?
Just think in this way: if the roseflower tries to become a lotus, the lotus tries to become a rose, both will be in tremendous suffering because neither can the rose become the lotus nor can the lotus become the rose. At the most they can pretend, and pretensions are not fulfilling. The roseflower can only be a roseflower. And the unfortunate thing is, when the roseflower starts trying to be a lotus, its energy goes into that effort of becoming a lotus. A lotus it can never become, it has no potential for it. It is not a lotus, and there is no need for it to be a lotus. If existence wanted a lotus there would have been a lotus. The existence needs a rose. Trying to be a lotus, the rose will be losing its energy in a fruitless, hopeless effort, and perhaps may not be able to even become a rose. From where will it find the energy to become a rose, the vitality to become a rose?
It is one of the most important psychological phenomena to understand: each individual is unique. There has never been that kind of individual before, and there will never be again that kind of individual.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“You have to understand one thing which is very fundamental. The world consists of verbs, not of nouns. Nouns are a human invention – necessary, but after all, a human invention. But existence consists of verbs, only of verbs, not nouns and pronouns. Look at this. You are seeing a flower, a rose. To call it a flower is not right, because it has not stopped flowering, it is still flowering; it is a verb, it is a flow. To call it a flower you have made it a noun. You see the river. You calI it a river – you have made it a noun. It is rivering. It will be more accurate to the existential to say that it is rivering, flowing. And everything is changing, flowing. The child is becoming a young man; the young man is becoming old; life is turning into death; death is turning into life. Everything is in continuity, continuous change; it is a continuum. There never comes a stop, a full stop. It comes only in language.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Belief is only ever in fictions. That which is true needs no belief, it is self-evidently what is. That is why I am not in favour of beliefs.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“You can do what you want, but you can’t direct your wants.”
— Schopenhauer
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Please understand that there is but one thing to be understood, and that is that you are the formless, timeless unborn. It is because of your identification with the body as an entity that your consciousness, which is universal consciousness, thinks that it is dying. Nobody dies, because no-one has been born.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited September 2023
“The very word ‘spiritual’ carries a condemnation, a division of the world into the holy and the not-holy.”
Life is not my business,
life is my breath, my joy and being.
When you believe you are a person,
you feel like life is something you have,
so you try to protect and
control it like a business.
When the Truth is known,
you gladly cease interfering,
knowing and observing
that life takes perfect care of life.
It is a perfect spontaneity.
A formless witness is filled
with unimaginable joy
in this perceiving.
One is timelessly here
as the Unchanging.
~ Mooji
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
edited September 2023
“Your heart is the light of this world. Don’t cover it with your mind.”
— Mooji
“Your urge to control life controls you.”
— Mooji
“Pay attention to that which sees the mind.”
— Mooji
2
JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Just as trees provide us with oxygen to breathe, for which no one thanks them, people who have become aware of the Truth radiate deep peace, oneness and love without consciously making an effort. Peace is their nature. There is a saying that reads: 'If I have a loaf of bread and give you half, I have half left, but if I give you all my knowledge and love, I still have all my knowledge and all my love left.' And so it goes with sharing Truth.”
“We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.”
— René Descartes
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“Let's see if we can determine what the problem really is. What we will reveal is a belief that things are not all going well. And when we look at this to find out the reason for it, we will discover that you identify with death. You identify with something that doesn't stay, that doesn't have a long life. You fell in love with time. You have fallen in love with objects, with ideas that are in the service of what passes by. This is how problems arise. This is how confusion has crept into your Being.”
— Mooji
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JeroenLuminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlandsVeteran
“The more the questions you throw at me the more there is a need to emphasise the physical aspect of our existence, namely, that there is nothing to what we have been made to believe. All our problems have arisen because of our acceptance that it is possible for us to understand the reality of the world, or the reality of our existence. What I am saying is that you have no way of experiencing anything that you do not know. So anything that you experience through the help of your knowledge is fruitless. It is a lost battle.”
Comments
Q: How did you come to have such a gloomy view of the world?
UG: I was surrounded by all kinds of religious people. I felt that there was something funny in their behavior. There was a wide gap between what they believed and how they lived. This always bothered me. But I could not call all of them hypocrites. I said to myself, "There is something wrong with what they believe. Maybe their source is wrong. All the teachers of mankind, particularly the spiritual teachers, conned themselves and conned the whole of mankind. So, I have to find out for myself, and I have no way of finding out anything for myself as long as I depend upon anyone."
I found that whatever I wanted was what they [the religious people] wanted me to want. Whatever I thought was whatever they wanted me to think. So there was no way out of this. Somewhere along the line something hit me: "There is nothing there to be transformed, nothing there to be changed. There is no mind there, nor is there any self to realize. What the hell am I doing?"
(Question asked of U. G. Krishnamurti)
Q: U.G., I would like to probe into the very essence of your revolutionary and uncompromising statement that there is no soul.
A: There is no self, there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind.
(Question asked of U. G. Krishnamurti)
Entrepreneur and writer Nat Eliason on the importance of challenging yourself to do hard things:
"The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.
Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.
If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.
But if we avoid hard things, anything mildly challenging will seem insurmountable. We’ll cry into TikTok over an errant period at the end of a text message. We’ll see ourselves as incapable of learning new skills, taking on new careers, and escaping bad situations.
The proof you can do hard things is one of the most powerful gifts you can give yourself.
Life is full of thought and wonder
~The Self~
When in a tunnel and you see the light, you must ask yourself, "Is that the sunlight or a train?".
-- Anonymous
“All religions are prisons, Hinduism or Buddhism or Christianity. But by changing prisons you do not achieve individual freedom. That is why I don’t want my people to be members of any organisation. Because if there is no freedom, there cannot be any spiritual growth.”
— Osho
“Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.”
— Osho
"I knew I should have made a left turn at Albaquerquy."
Bugs Bunny
"The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you. We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you are looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts."
~Alan Watts~...
“Nature, people, birth and death and all our struggles, our fears and our desires are contained in unconditional love and are a reflection of it.”
— Tony Parsons
“I suddenly saw that the real meaning of forgiveness is that there is absolutely no one and nothing to forgive. It doesn't matter how often you seem to be wrong, or what you do or don't do. It doesn't matter how much you look for or not. There is only this being. It's unconditional love.”
— Tony Parsons
“Because from the moment we get separated we think that's wrong, and that we are 'wrong'. From the moment we get separated, seemingly dualism appears. 'Is there a place called paradise or wholeness anywhere else? Why am I not in wholeness? Something is wrong, and if something is wrong then something must also be good. So I have to find something good to make up for what's wrong again. So I'm going to be a Buddhist or whatever.' As soon as that is there, the whole drama of good and evil breaks loose.
You then get cause and effect, good and evil, karma and reincarnation, time, space, separation, path - all those things that reinforce that so important idea that I am an individual and that somewhere there is a place better than this one. If you look at all religions, they are about a place that is better than this one. They all deny in all possible voices that this is it.”
— Tony Parsons
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society
~Jiddu Krishnamurti~
Q: I have read that if you become enlightened or become free, there will be peace and joy and bliss.
A: It's a way to sell something. You know, the whole enlightenment story is about 'you' getting something, and the ironic thing is that enlightenment is about loss. It's about there being no 'you'. There are a lot of teachers who claim to start from that idea. They start by saying, 'There is only unity. No one can do anything to be enlightened. It goes beyond everything - but what you have to do in the preparatory period to find out is meditate or do self-examination.'... or whatever is in their booklet. You need to prepare yourself for the discovery that there is no one and that you cannot prepare for anything.
(Question asked of Tony Parsons)
“As man becomes more civilized, he becomes potentially more mad. One who is uncivilized is potentially less mad because he still understands the language of the body, he still cooperates with it. His body is not suppressed; his body is the flowering of his being.”
— Osho
Q: ARE YOU SAYING THAT MARRIAGE CANNOT BE SPIRITUAL?
A: It cannot be. Marriage can never be spiritual because it is a fixed thing. But I have used marriage just as an example. In fact, the whole of society can never be spiritual because it is based on rules. Rules are always serious; you cannot be playful about them.
When Bodhidharma reached China, he put one shoe on his head and the other on his foot. The emperor asked, ”What are you doing? What nonsense!”
Bodhidharma said, ”I am joking.”
The emperor said, ”But we never expected a joking, laughing sadhu.”
Bodhidharma said, ”How is it possible for a sadhu to be serious? God is not serious, he is so unceasingly playful!”
Creativity comes out of playfulness; hence so much creativity is born out of satori.
(Question asked of Osho)
“The desire for inner knowledge, the desire for this experience or that experience, is part and parcel of the seriousness disease. The serious mind even tries to categorize religious experience; it wants to become the authority: ”I have inner knowledge. I know, and you don’t know. I will teach you.” Again, the mind is attempting to recreate the pattern of the serious society. Do you see it? Religious societies have been created only for this purpose. Sects, ashrams, monasteries, etcetera, are alternative societies.
But the spiritual person is always playful. His life is just play, he is not serious about anything that he does.”
— Osho
"That which knows, is never an object of its own knowledge"
~Shankara~ (a repeat)
“Whenever it happens that a scientist turns to poetry, or a poet turns to mathematics, or a businessman turns to painting, or a painter becomes a sannyasin, then something new is born. And to give birth to something new is blissful; otherwise your daily work becomes dull and boring. Man cannot work like a machine – he cannot go on just producing the same things mechanically, repeating the same routine endlessly. If he goes on doing this, he will be completely dead long before he dies. He will only know that he has been alive when death comes.”
— Osho
"If you always do what you have always done...You will always get what you have always got"
~Henry Ford~
“Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
“We are born not knowing who we are, we don't know how to think. We only know how to feel. It is through our feelings that how we are raised creates the trajectory for our future lives.”
— Natasha Khazanov
“From a wellness perspective, our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalized demonstration of what can go awry. Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
“The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
https://www.sonima.com/meditation/means-take-refuge/
Bonus track from an X-Buddhist 👩🎤
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment.
Byron Katie
“It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom
“You can only be afraid of what you think you know.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Happiness is strange; it comes when you are not seeking it. When you are not making an effort to be happy, then unexpectedly, mysteriously, happiness is there, born of purity, of a loveliness of being.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. ... The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“It is love alone that leads to right action. What brings order in the world is to love and let love do what it will.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
Life isn’t about feeling good. It’s about being good and doing good.
Bhante Varrapanyo
"True freedom is not having a bounty on your head, and every cop and mercenary looking to get you."
“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” - Alan Watts
“So I have been carrying a heavy weight on me, on my heart. My health has been destroyed for many reasons; the most important is this, that I have been speaking on people with whom I do not agree at all. I disagree – not only disagree, but I find them basically psychotic, neurotic, schizophrenic, anti-life. All these religions in the past are anti-life. Nobody is for life, nobody is for living, nobody is for laughter. No religion has accepted a sense of humor as a quality of religiousness.
Hence, I say my religion is the first religion which takes man in his totality, in his naturalness, accepts man’s whole, as he is. And that’s what holy means to me – not something sacred, but something accepted in its wholeness. Perhaps things are a little bit upside down and you have to put them in place; just like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to put them in place. And then out of that wholeness arises religious consciousness.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
“Christianity accepts only one life. In one life how many sins can you commit? If you continuously commit sins day and night for seventy years, from the first day to the last you go on like a chain- sinner, then too eternal punishment cannot be justified. Eternal punishment... forever? There will be no end to it! And I don’t think you commit sins continuously every moment. A man may be committing a few sins... may go to a jail for four years, five years; it may be justified. But eternal hell? So they are exploiting your fear: fear of hell and greed for pleasure in heaven. That has been their total pattern of working on the human mind. I want to say to you that they are only so-called religions. They are not religions at all.
This is the first religion. I don’t promise you any heaven, and I don’t make you afraid of any hell; there is none. I don’t say, ”You have to follow me, then only can you be saved.” That is absolutely egoistic. Jesus says, ”Come, follow me.” Even my book on Jesus is titled Come Follow Me. That is not my statement, it is Jesus’ statement. If you ask me I will say, ”Never! Don’t follow me, because I am myself lost. Unless you choose to be lost forever like me... then it is okay.” To me, anybody claiming any kind of superiority, and you have to follow him – it is a fascist attitude.
My sannyasins are not my followers but my fellow travelers, my friends, my lovers.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
“The very idea of following makes me sick. It is sickening. You have to be yourself, and when you blossom, you are not going to be like me or like Jesus or like Buddha. You are going to be just like you: you have never happened before, and you are not going to happen again. It is only possible with you. You are unrepeatable. If you start following somebody you are missing a great opportunity that existence has provided for you, and you will never be happy. No Christian is happy, no Hindu is happy, no Buddhist is happy; they cannot be. How can you be happy?
Just think in this way: if the roseflower tries to become a lotus, the lotus tries to become a rose, both will be in tremendous suffering because neither can the rose become the lotus nor can the lotus become the rose. At the most they can pretend, and pretensions are not fulfilling. The roseflower can only be a roseflower. And the unfortunate thing is, when the roseflower starts trying to be a lotus, its energy goes into that effort of becoming a lotus. A lotus it can never become, it has no potential for it. It is not a lotus, and there is no need for it to be a lotus. If existence wanted a lotus there would have been a lotus. The existence needs a rose. Trying to be a lotus, the rose will be losing its energy in a fruitless, hopeless effort, and perhaps may not be able to even become a rose. From where will it find the energy to become a rose, the vitality to become a rose?
It is one of the most important psychological phenomena to understand: each individual is unique. There has never been that kind of individual before, and there will never be again that kind of individual.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
“You have to understand one thing which is very fundamental. The world consists of verbs, not of nouns. Nouns are a human invention – necessary, but after all, a human invention. But existence consists of verbs, only of verbs, not nouns and pronouns. Look at this. You are seeing a flower, a rose. To call it a flower is not right, because it has not stopped flowering, it is still flowering; it is a verb, it is a flow. To call it a flower you have made it a noun. You see the river. You calI it a river – you have made it a noun. It is rivering. It will be more accurate to the existential to say that it is rivering, flowing. And everything is changing, flowing. The child is becoming a young man; the young man is becoming old; life is turning into death; death is turning into life. Everything is in continuity, continuous change; it is a continuum. There never comes a stop, a full stop. It comes only in language.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
“Belief is only ever in fictions. That which is true needs no belief, it is self-evidently what is. That is why I am not in favour of beliefs.”
— Osho, From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
“You can do what you want, but you can’t direct your wants.”
— Schopenhauer
“Please understand that there is but one thing to be understood, and that is that you are the formless, timeless unborn. It is because of your identification with the body as an entity that your consciousness, which is universal consciousness, thinks that it is dying. Nobody dies, because no-one has been born.”
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The very word ‘spiritual’ carries a condemnation, a division of the world into the holy and the not-holy.”
— Osho, Tao: The Three Treasures
Life is not my business,
life is my breath, my joy and being.
When you believe you are a person,
you feel like life is something you have,
so you try to protect and
control it like a business.
When the Truth is known,
you gladly cease interfering,
knowing and observing
that life takes perfect care of life.
It is a perfect spontaneity.
A formless witness is filled
with unimaginable joy
in this perceiving.
One is timelessly here
as the Unchanging.
~ Mooji
“Your heart is the light of this world. Don’t cover it with your mind.”
— Mooji
“Your urge to control life controls you.”
— Mooji
“Pay attention to that which sees the mind.”
— Mooji
“Just as trees provide us with oxygen to breathe, for which no one thanks them, people who have become aware of the Truth radiate deep peace, oneness and love without consciously making an effort. Peace is their nature. There is a saying that reads: 'If I have a loaf of bread and give you half, I have half left, but if I give you all my knowledge and love, I still have all my knowledge and all my love left.' And so it goes with sharing Truth.”
— Mooji
“We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.”
— René Descartes
“Let's see if we can determine what the problem really is. What we will reveal is a belief that things are not all going well. And when we look at this to find out the reason for it, we will discover that you identify with death. You identify with something that doesn't stay, that doesn't have a long life. You fell in love with time. You have fallen in love with objects, with ideas that are in the service of what passes by. This is how problems arise. This is how confusion has crept into your Being.”
— Mooji
“The more the questions you throw at me the more there is a need to emphasise the physical aspect of our existence, namely, that there is nothing to what we have been made to believe. All our problems have arisen because of our acceptance that it is possible for us to understand the reality of the world, or the reality of our existence. What I am saying is that you have no way of experiencing anything that you do not know. So anything that you experience through the help of your knowledge is fruitless. It is a lost battle.”
— U.G. Krishnamurti