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"Look how upset they get if they have a stain on their shirt. Do you call that a success? Look at how frightened they are at the prospect they might not be reelected. Do you call that a success?"

"Lots of people are depressed and they’re not aware they are depressed. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they were."

"When you bump your knee against a table, the table’s fine. It’s busy being what it was made to be—a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell us that reality is all right."

""Very well, I’ve understood your symptoms. I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor!” The patient replies, “Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better.” The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if somebody else changes."

"You keep insisting, “I feel good because the world is right.” Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That’s what all the mystics are saying."

"Many people swing into action only to make things worse. They’re not coming from Love, they’re coming from negative feelings. They’re coming from guilt, anger, hate; from a sense of injustice or whatever."

"Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as YOU see fit. That’s selfish."

"Some people make Awakening a goal. They are determined to get there; they say, “I refuse to be happy until I’m awakened.”"

"If you think that compassion implies softness, there’s no way I can describe compassion to you, absolutely no way, because compassion can be very hard. Compassion can be very rude, compassion can jolt you"

"Nobody was mean to you. Somebody was mean to what he or she thought was you, but not to you. Nobody ever rejects you; they’re only rejecting what they think you are. But that cuts both ways. Nobody ever accepts you either."

"You’re like a person driving the car; he doesn’t ever want to lose consciousness of the car. It’s all right to daydream, but not to lose consciousness of your surroundings."

""Green is soft like music", "No, like satin!" Neither of them know what they're talking about because if they did they'd shut up" "It's even worse because one day you give sight to this blind man. "Well now you know what green is." "That's true, I heard some of it this morning"

"You're never so full of yourself as when you're in pain. You're never so centered on yourself as when you're depressed. You're never so ready to forget yourself as when you are happy."

"Many say we have a natural urge to be Loved and appreciated, to belong. That's false. Drop this illusion and you will find happiness. We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to Love, but not to be Loved. "

"If I tell you I saw a "leaf" this morning, you really don't have an idea of what I saw. You do have an idea of what I did not see. When I give you an idea, I give you something, and yet how little I have given you."

"If you're attached to appreciation and praise, you're going to view people in terms of their threat to your attachment or their fostering of your attachment."

"A therapist says, "Let's ease the suffering." The spiritual director says "Let her suffer, she'll get sick of this way of relating to people and she'll finally decide to break out of this prison of emotional dependence on others."

"When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can spot the mild anxiety. They want to be awake, to find out if they are really awake or not. That's part of asceticism, not awareness." "The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived"

"Till u are aware of yourself, you have no right to interfere with anyone else or with the world. The danger of attempting to change others or change things when you are not aware is that you may be changing things for your own convenience, your pride, your dogmatic convictions"

"You can Love only when you are alone. What does it mean to Love? It means to see a person, a situation as it really is, not as you imagine it to be. And to give the response it deserves. You can hardly be said to be in Love when you do not even see."

"To be without the drug is so unbearable a torment that is seems preferable to die. Think of that image, the body has gotten addicted tot he drug. You were given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention."

"When a child is sure of his mother's Love, he forgets his mother; he goes out to explore the world; he is curious. His mother's always been threatening in many subtle ways to abandon him."

"When you are ignored or disapproved of you experience a loneliness so unbearable that you crawl back to people and beg for the comforting drug called support and encouragement. you've got to live up to expectations. To be with people is to live in tension. "

"One no longer sees others as means of satisfying one's addictions. Only someone who has attempted this knows the terrors of the process. It's like inviting yourself to die. It's like asking the poor drug addict to give up the only happiness he has ever known."