Free. Love. Kind. (#FLK)

The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else, because everybody else is farther away from you. It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake – the first ripples will arise around the stone and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one’s body, one has to love one’s soul, one has to love one’s totality.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Sometimes I imagine I’m a heap of sand - if you remove me, grain by grain, at what point am I no longer a heap? How much would I have to change as a person, before I’d no longer be me at all? I guess we’re made of many selves. Within my every thought, every word, every act, are the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever met. And the ghosts of everyone they’ve ever met. The ghosts of my ancestors. The ghosts of every song, book, film, play, painting. They all vibrate within me. They are me. Which means I’m a little better now, because you’re a part of me, too. In a way, we’re reincarnated in every individual moment. So we’re not just one person, but a linear sequence of innumerable incrementally different people, each burying the last and becoming born anew. Sort of the way the cells in our bodies regenerate every seven years. And the things we think define us are almost irrelevant, given a cosmic context. I mean, if extraterrestrials found these letters in a distant future, how would they imagine us? Elderly? Young? Rich? Poor? Male? Female? They wouldn’t have a clue. But they’d know I adore you. Granted, intelligence-wise, we might be termites next to them. But love-wise? They wouldn’t stand a chance.

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.

At the moment of enlightenment everything falls away - everything. Suddenly the ground beneath you is gone, and you are alone. You are alone because you have realized that there is no other; there is no separation. There is only you, only Self, only limitless emptiness, pure consciousness. To the mind, the ego, this appears terrifying. When it looks at limitlessness and infinity, it sees meaninglessness and despair. However, the view changes to unending joy and wonder once the mind is let go of. When you are enlightened, you stand alone. You need no supports of any kind because there is nothing to support; a separate you no longer exists. You realize that the whole ego experience was a flimsy illusion. You stand alone but are never, never lonely because everywhere you look, all you see is That, and you are That.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together

Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest — thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the underwood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.