“We ask ourselves is it possible to break through this heavy conditioning of centuries immediately and not enter into another conditioning – to be free, so that the mind can be altogether new, sensitive, alive, aware, intense, capable? That is our problem. There is no other problem because when the mind is made new it can tackle any problem. That is the only question we have to ask ourselves. But we do not ask. We want to be told. […] What I say has very little value. You will forget it the moment you shut this book, or you will remember and repeat certain phrases, or you will compare what you have read here with some other book – but you will not face your own life. And that is all that matters – your life, yourself, your pettiness, your shallowness, your brutality, your violence, your greed, your ambition, your daily agony and endless sorrow – that is what you have to understand and nobody on earth or in heaven is going to save you from it but yourself.”

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

In the end, language always fails. No matter how many words we use, no matter how we arrange them, no matter how much time we take, we cannot fully capture our experience. The best we can hope for is the transcending power of metaphor — that our words will somehow provoke a feeling close to the feeling of the actual experience.

When the moisture rises in a mist in the sweet valley all around me and the high sun rests on the surface of the forest's impenetrable darkness and only occasional beams find their way into the inner sanctum and I lie in the tall grass by the tumbling stream and, thus close to the earth, become aware of the myriad varieties of grasses, and when I feel the seething of the world of small things among the stalks, feel against my heart the countless unfathomable shapes and forms of the tiny creatures that flit and crawl, and I feel the presence of the Almighty who created us in his image, the wafting breath of the Love that encompasses all, that upholds and sustains us in an eternal joy, oh my friend, at the dawning then before my eyes when the world and the heavens reside in my soul completely like the bodily shape of a beloved woman, then how i yearn and often have said to myself, Oh could you give that some answering expression, only breathe into the page what is so fully and warmly alive in you till it becomes the mirror of your soul just as your soul is the mirror of the unending deity!—Oh my friend!—But it will be the downfall of me, I lie defeated by the force of the splendour of these phenomena.

. . . "being healthy is best, and second is to have become beautiful, and third," as the poet who wrote the song says, "is being wealthy without fraud."

And like the others, all of whom I violently disagreed with, I found in him an expression of the American spirit at its worst. Progress was their obsession. More machines, more efficiency, more capital, more comforts—that was their whole talk, I asked them if they had heard of the millions who were unemployed in America. They ignored the question. I asked them if they realized how empty, restless and miserable the American people were with all their machine-made luxuries and comforts. They were impervious to my sarcasm. What they wanted was success—money, power, a place in the sun. None of them wanted to return to their own country; for some reason they had all of them been obliged to return against their will. They said there was no life for them in their own country. When would life begin? I wanted to know. When they had all the things which America had, or Germany, or France. Life was made up of things, of machines mainly, from what I could gather. Life without money was an impossibility: one had to have clothes, a good home, a radio, a car, a tennis racquet, and so on. I told them I had none of those things and that I was happy without them, that I had turned my back on America precisely because these things meant nothing to me.

Nonbeing can never be; being can never not be. Both these statements are obvious to those who have seen the truth.

“One cannot avoid taking fright when one looks into depths of the spirit. Profundity and the will etc. know no bounds.”