Suffering

Hurt is not automatic. Somewhere there is an admission from you that you are hurt, and that you would be hurt, and that you would call yourself as hurt. Don’t call yourself as hurt, and see what happens.

Hurt is not an obligation. Hurt is a choice. Insecurity, fear, temptations—none… read_more

Have you looked at kids playing? If you look at kids playing and if you look at animals playing, you won’t find much difference. In fact, human kids go along very well with animal kids. Later on, when we cover ourselves with a lot of acquired knowledge, with a lot… read_more

Welcome pain. You have no option. That’s the way life is meant to be. Life is suffering. Because not only are you designed to have pain, you are also designed to resist pain.

Have pain, and have a lot of depth in your being. So much depth that it can… read_more

Just as the ego loves to take credit, it also loves to play the victim.

If something good has happened, “I did it!”

If something bad happened, “It happened to me.”

“Good things I do, bad things happen to me”—this is astounding.

Playing the victim is a favorite pastime of… read_more

Happiness and sadness are both wonderful, are both welcome.

But in some deep sense, sadness is a little better than happiness. It teaches us a little more than happiness does. It elevates us a little more than happiness does. It has a certain purifying effect that happiness does not quite… read_more

If you are suffering, there is nobody but you who is responsible. Unless you fully accept that responsibility, there is no freedom. If your suffering is just incidental, then how can there be freedom from it?—because incidents can happen any way, any day.

You have to, first of all, clearly… read_more

Both the genders have become even more anchored to their physical identity. The more you do that, the more you are in misery because, really, the body is not who you are.

There are places better and higher than the place of your gender specific hormones. Why do you want… read_more

When you say sadness is just sadness, then you have gained freedom from sadness. It means being free from the obligation to label sadness as a loss of self-worth. If you let sadness go deeply into you, there is no way it is not going to touch joy.

It is… read_more

How do we justify our anger? We justify our anger by feeling short-changed, cheated, or victimized; by continuing to assert that we are incomplete, while simultaneously bemoaning the incompleteness. If you have grudges within, if you feel a victim of situations, or past, or persons, and if you lend credence… read_more

The approach of self-help is: “I am sad because my desires have not met fulfillment. So, the way to help myself is: fulfill desires.” It’s a dimensional difference. Therefore, self-help pleases but helps not. It is not then ‘self-help’; the genre should be more correctly called ‘self-gratification’.

And if you… read_more

There is someone you say you love dearly. You tell that person, “You are my life!” That person passes away; within a few hours, you are found having your meals. You are in grief—the body is not in grief, the brain is not in grief. The brain is telling the… read_more

If it was possible for one man to move towards greatness, it was possible for everybody. Nothing hurts the small man more than seeing a great man in his vicinity, or a small man trying to move towards greatness. It’s an utter insult.

The moment even one person defies smallness… read_more

Facebook spirituality says, “The greatest religion is not to hurt others.” Just Google it, you’ll find a million responses. What is the greatest religion? To not hurt others.

If there is one fellow who is a bigger culprit than the fellow who gets easily hurt, it is the one who… read_more

For us, life means reactivity. Life is not peace to us. Life is not meditativeness to us. We feel alive when we are tense, reactive, and agitated. Then you say that now you have come alive.

The fellow is sitting silently and peacefully, unnoticeable. You will say he is a… read_more

What is the wrong choice? Anything that involves helplessness is the wrong choice. That’s the definition. Whenever you say, “I got angry”; whenever you say, “I am depressed,” it is a wrong choice because you are not admitting that you have chosen to be depressed. You are not admitting that… read_more

We deeply disagree with freedom. We may keep saying we want it, but we agree only with the cage. Why do we agree to the cage? Because the cage gives us fruits and vegetables. Freedom means, no more fruits and vegetables. Freedom means, now you are on your own. Go,… read_more

The lion kills all his life, but he cannot be called violent. He cannot be called non-violent either. He is just doing what his physical conditioning compels him to do. He has no option. Man has the option to kill and not to kill. Man has the option to choose… read_more

Who told you that rape is merely a sexual activity? Anything that you look at just as a body, as a material to be consumed, is rape. A mind that cannot love will only rape. And we all rape. Look at the way people spread dirt around. Is that not… read_more

Is there discipline without pain? You have to get up at some point in the morning—doesn’t that involve pain? Pleasure is to keep sleeping even after the alarm has rung—is that not pleasurable?

So, all discipline is nothing but pain. It’s very well-directed pain, it’s very discrete pain, but nevertheless,… read_more

If you are occupied in something really worthwhile, would you really care for things like pain? Even an ordinary sportsperson would tell you that when you are pursuing something even as normal as victory in a match, pain ceases to be a big botheration. Unless it becomes crippling; then you… read_more

Those who suppress their loneliness become victims of suppression. Those who keep in touch with their loneliness come up with great creativity.

Beautiful songs have risen out of human melancholy. People talk of songs written in joy. I say that all songs that have any truth in them have actually… read_more

Spiritual practitioners, those who have really wanted to know and live life fully, have invited pain. Knowing fully well that the road they are taking would hurt them, they have still gone down those roads.

To the common man, pain is incidental, uninvited. It comes as a surprise: “Oh! Pain… read_more

Life will certainly teach you, but at the cost of great suffering. And there is no guarantee you will be able to learn in a lifetime, because when your life teaches you then life has no conscious agenda to teach you. Life just operates on the principle of result of… read_more

You are doing the right thing but not finding validation of it from your peers. So, in spite of doing the right thing and living rightly, or at least beginning to live rightly, you feel as if something deeply wrong is happening with you. It’s a bad situation.

Change your… read_more

If the kid has observed half an hour of a fight at home, then he has probably absorbed more than what he would usually absorb in a week’s time. The fights are usually not in the service of divine matters, are they? You fight for the sake of money, or… read_more

Doesn’t it behoove the intelligent one to ask: Am I born to just wallow in this nonsense? Is it my fate to crave, cringe, yell and shriek, and then, when I am fed up of yelling, put on a fake laughter or something?

Those honest questions need to be asked.… read_more

In habit, there is no decision-making involved, right? You just do it. So, habit is not the problem. The problem is that we are habituated to the wrong things. Habits should be where there is really only one right decision possible. In all those matters be fully habituated.

In fact,… read_more

You’re asking me, “Is it possible to act rightly with trembling hands?” I am saying, you can act rightly only with trembling hands.

One unmistakable quality of right action would be that it would require all your guts. It is only false action that you can comfortably undertake. Falseness is… read_more

There is no remedy against any of the torments of our lives except calling them out. You have to expose them. You have to name them. You have to call them out.

You already know. It’s a matter of acknowledgment rather than realization. Acknowledge it.

There is nothing greatly mystical… read_more

The belief that life is just crumbs and dredges thrown at you—that’s your undoing. You are content with too little.

To avoid facing pain, you have become numb and insensitive towards yourself. Deeper sensitivity results in deeper pain. To avoid facing pain we become insensitive, and when you are insensitive,… read_more

Even in those situations that we call as utterly woeful, utterly hopeless, if we just do that which we are capable of doing, would there be space and opportunity and time to despair? If you do what you must, where is the time to suffer?

In fact, the more impossibly… read_more

Do attractive girls actually get more love? I know they get more of attention—sexual attention. Surely a lot of attractive girls try to keep themselves attractive, and even more attractive, in the hope of getting more love. That’s tragic!

Somebody needs to shout it out very loudly, and in the… read_more

You cannot wish for health only in the moments when the virus attacks you. When pain hits you, then you cry out, “Awareness, awareness!” but in your moments of pleasure you forget all about it.

Health will not suddenly come to you. But if you have been healthy, then health… read_more

It indeed does help to feel like a victim. It does not help you , but it helps that within you which is a product of victimization. Because if you are a victim, then you are entitled to certain rights. All victims get entitled to special rights.

Operate from a… read_more

When someone says, “Oh! I am suffering so much in a toxic relationship and I am yet continuing to tolerate it,” then he is just stating only half the story, either ignorantly or deliberately. The fact is, if you are tolerating a toxic relationship, you are deriving some pleasure out… read_more

If you move towards greatness or aspire for it and that hurts the people around you, that only means that the people around you are insistent on remaining small. Further, it also means that the people around you do not love you at all. Not only do they not love… read_more

You do not really care about the expectations that, let’s say, the entire humanity has from you. It is bitterly cold and a dog is outside your doorsteps; you do not wonder about the expectations that that dog might be having. It is only the expectations of a particular four… read_more

Man has such great systems of morality, and yet man is a mass murderer. Man has caused thousands of species to get extinct, and they will never come back. Man is causing this very planet to be destroyed in a couple of decades. And man rapes, man kills, man hoards,… read_more

Loneliness does not decrease when you connect to a thousand other people using technology. Loneliness is a thing within. Irrespective of how many people you are connected to in a party or via Zoom, loneliness is not going to decrease. It’s just that when you are in a party, loneliness… read_more

Do you have kids? I don’t know whether you have. Do you know how they are being abused in their schools? And that does not mean that somebody is fondling them in the genitals. Have you looked at their teachers? Have you studied their curricula? Have you seen what is… read_more

You defeat someone not because he is weak; you defeat someone when he wants to protect his weaknesses. Understand the difference. It is not your weaknesses that defeat you; it is your fondness towards your weaknesses, your protective attitude towards your weaknesses that defeats you.

If you are prepared to… read_more

Attachment necessarily comes with violence, fear, greed, delusion, boredom, loneliness, suspicion—they all go together. And since they all go together, therefore, when you decide to quit one of them, the central one of them, you are actually quitting each one of them. And when you are quitting each one of… read_more

You need not manage hurt; you need to keep playing on. Two things: one, there must be fun in the game; secondly, there must be a subtle pride at stake. Believe me, there is no player worth his name who has not played in pain, not played through pain. Believe… read_more

“Anybody can come and spoil my mood. And even to correct my mood, I need some external help: I need to watch a movie, I need to listen to some kind of music, I need to talk to my best friend. I at least need to sleep to correct my… read_more

The more your inner dissatisfaction grows, the more becomes the importance of diverse objects in your life, and vice versa, mind you. The more the prevalence and production and consumption of objects will grow, the more the dissatisfaction in your life will grow.

Now do you see why neurosis has… read_more

The relationship is not rotten if two people are troublesome to each other. The relationship is really rotten when two people can’t even tell each other how big a trouble the other one is to him or her. And they often say, “It is for the sake of the other… read_more

There is some worthy battle that deserves to be fought, but you are not accepting the challenge. Because you are not accepting the challenge, there is an intrinsic misery in life; self-respect is missing.One is not really able to admire oneself.That’s not at all a nice place to be in.… read_more