You don't have to feel bad to act kindly. Love doesn't stand by, it moves with the speed of clarity.
I am the perpetrator of my suffering - but only all of it.
I think that's the trick: wanting what I have.
It's only our story that keeps us from knowing that we always have everything we need.
It takes only one person to have a successful relationship.
The Work is four questions and a turnaround. The Work is a way to identify and question the thoughts that cause all the suffering and violence in the world. The Work is a very, very simple process. It's for anyone who can answer a question that is willing to. It takes a bit of willingness and an open mind.
I think our children are afraid to die because we're afraid to die.
The ultimate and dearest - and, again, only - relationship we have is the relationship we have with our thoughts.
We all begin to do what we can do, just like we're doing now, to clean up the planet and to find solutions rather than fight. It just happens everywhere.
If I say, if I talk about, 'I want to be enlightened...' it implies a future. And there isn't any.
Who I believed myself to be was a hopeless case. I would wake up in the mornings and notice I was still alive and breathing and hate God, hate myself, hate life, and contemplate ways of killing myself.
When you don't believe something, you can't make yourself believe it. There's nothing you can do to believe it again. You either believe it or you don't.
If I'm okay with dying, my son is at least as enlightened as that. If I'm okay with my cancer, my son is at least as enlightened as I am.
I have a list of universal beliefs, and they are amazing beliefs, like, "No one cares" or "You don't care about me"; "I should be successful" or "I'm not successful"; "I don't have enough money"; "I'm too tall or thin or fat"; "I shouldn't have done it" - oh, my goodness, they go on and on and on.
What I say and what I'm really experiencing - those universes are very different.
No one told me that you could be alive and be happy. No one told me, and if someone had I wouldn't have believed them. I thought that you had to die - physically die - to escape.
The world will be at war as long as the mind is at war with itself.
When I turn the thought around - the thought that war, let's say war in Iraq, should stop - the turnaround is the war in myself should stop.
For me, the future lives only here in my mind, as thoughts and images, just as the past does, and I love those thoughts and the world that it produces. I am entirely optimistic about the future.
If you want a little fear and terror because your life is dull, get a future. Terrifying!
Mind is infinitely creative. And when it's not stuck, that's where the joy comes from. Something happens, and the way we think about it, understand it, see it, is actually hilarious, whereas before it used to depress us.
My experience is the opposite.
Stories are the untested, uninvestigated theories that tell us what all these things mean. We don’t even realize that they’re just theories.
I'm the one who changes the world if I can follow what I think should and shouldn't be lived in this world.
If you want to clean up the environment, start with your mind. It starts there!