Art of Life

Learn to feel yourself in other bodies, to know that we are all one. Throw all other nonsense to the winds. Spit out your actions, good or bad, and never think of them again. What is done is done. Throw off superstition. Have no weakness even in the face of death. Be free.

Wait with patience and love and strength. If helpers are not ready now, they will come in time. Why should we be in a hurry? The real working force of all great work is in its almost unperceived beginnings.

Above all, beware of compromises. Hold on to your own principles in weal or woe and never adjust them to others’ “fads” through the greed of getting supporters. Your Atman is the support of the universe—whose support do you stand in need of?

Realize your true nature. That is all there is to do. Know yourself as you are—infinite spirit. That is practical religion. Everything else is impractical, for everything else will perish.

In real meditation you forget the body. You may be cut to pieces and not feel it at all. You feel such pleasure in it. You become so light. This perfect rest we will get in meditation.

Meditation means the mind is turned back upon itself. The mind stops all the thought-waves and the world stops. Your consciousness expands. Every time you meditate, you will keep your growth.

Avoid excessive merriment. A mind in that state never becomes calm; it becomes fickle. Excessive merriment will always be followed by sorrow. Tears and laughter are near kin. People so often run from one extreme to the other.

If the mind is intensely eager, everything can be accomplished—mountains can be crumbled into atoms.

The greatest sin is to think that you are weak. No one is greater: realize that you are Brahman. Nothing has power except what you give it.

Whose meditation is real and effective? Who can really surrender to the will of God? Only the person whose mind has been purified by selfless work.

The secret of life is not enjoyment but education through experience.

Let the mind be cheerful but calm. Never let it run into excesses, because every excess will be followed by a reaction.

It is only by doing good to others that one attains to one's own good.

We are suffering from our own karma. It is not the fault of God. What we do is our own fault, nothing else. Why should God be blamed?

The less the thought of the body, the better it is. For it is the body that drags us down. It is attachment, identification which makes us miserable. That is the secret: to think that I am the spirit and not the body, and that the whole of this universe with all its relations, with all its good and all its evil, is but as a series of paintings--scenes on a canvas--of which I am the witness.