nitrous oxide and enlightenment

in spontaneous laughter the noise of the mind stops for a few precious moments, allowing us to experience mindlessness or meditation, however fleetingly.

Some quotes about Selfishness

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

“The one who loves the least, controls the relationship.”

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.”

“There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.”

“Those who do not hate their own selfishness and regard themselves as more important than the rest of the world are blind because the truth lies elsewhere”

“Self is ingenious, crooked, and, governed by subtle and snaky desire, admits of endless turnings and qualifications, and the deluded worshippers of self vainly imagine that they can gratify every worldly desire, and at the same time possess the Truth”

Even when he is still,
The selfish man is busy.
Even when he is busy,
The selfless man is still.

Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Take it easy

Have you ever taken note of one thing?--the present is always juicy, the present is always blissful. Worry and suffering are created either by what you wanted to do in the past and could not do, or by what you want to do in the future and don't know whether you will be able to do or not. Did you ever notice, did you ever look at this small truth, that there is no suffering in the present, there is no worry? This is why the present does not disturb the mind--anxiety disturbs the mind.
There is no suffering in the present. The present doesn't know suffering--the present is such a small moment that suffering cannot fit into it. In the present only heaven can fit, not hell. Hell is too big! The present can only be peace, can only be happiness.
The moment you rest, the moment you relax, you know that existence is already going, moving, reaching towards higher peaks. And you are part of it. You need not have separate ambitions.
This is relaxation--resting, dropping all private goals, dropping the whole achieving mind, all the ego projections. And then life is a mystery. Your eyes will be full of wonder; your heart will be full of awe.
We are not to become something--we are already it. This is the whole message of all the awakened ones: that you are not to achieve something, it has already been given to you. It is God's gift. You are already where you should be, you can't be anywhere else. There is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. Because there is nowhere to go and nothing to achieve, you can celebrate. Then there is no hurry, no worry, no anxiety, no anguish, no fear of being a failure. You can't fail. In the very nature of things it is impossible to fail, because there is no question of success at all.

"whatever i am,i am,and this is the way i am going to be."

For the ordinary man what others say matters too much, because he has nothing of his own. Whatever he thinks he is, is just a collection of opinions of other people. Somebody has said, "You are beautiful," somebody has said, "You are intelligent," and he has been collecting all these. Hence he's always afraid: he should not behave in such a way that he loses his reputation, respectability. He is always afraid of public opinion, what people will say, because all that he knows about himself is what people have said about him. If they take it back, they leave him naked. Then he does not know who he is, ugly, beautiful, intelligent, unintelligent. He has no idea, even vaguely, of his own being; he depends on others.

But the man of meditation has no need of others' opinions. He knows himself, so it does not matter what others say. Even if the whole world says something that goes against his own experience, he will simply laugh. At the most, that can be the only response. But he is not going to take any step to change people's opinion. Who are they? They don't know themselves and they are trying to label him. He will reject labeling. He will simply say, "Whatever I am, I am, and this is the way I am going to be."

quotes[carl jung]

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding
of ourselves.”

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.”

“Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness
conscious.”

“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely”

“There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other
in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of
darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not
balanced by sadness.”

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are
themselves”

truth

Truth is your own experience, your own vision. Even if I have seen the truth and I tell you, the moment I tell you it will become a lie for you, not a truth. For me it was truth, for me it came through the eyes. It was my vision. For you, it will not be your vision, it will be a borrowed thing. It will be a belief, it will be knowledge--not knowing. And if you start believing in it, you will be believing a lie. Now remember it. Even a truth becomes a lie if it enters your being through the wrong door. The truth has to enter through the front door, through the eyes. Truth is a vision. One has to see it.
Naropa was a great scholar, a great pundit, with ten thousand disciples of his own. One day he was sitting surrounded by thousands of scriptures--ancient, very ancient, rare. Suddenly he fell asleep, must have been tired, and he saw a vision. He saw a very, very old, ugly, horrible woman--a hag. Her ugliness was such that he started trembling in his sleep. It was so nauseating he wanted to escape--but where to escape, where to go? He was caught, as if hypnotized by the old hag. Her eyes were like magnets. "What are you studying?" asked the old woman. He said, "Philosophy, religion, epistemology, language, grammar, logic." The old woman asked again, "Do you understand them?" Naropa said, "Of course... Yes, I understand them." The woman asked again, "Do you understand the word, or the sense?" Thousands of questions had been asked to Naropa in his life--thousands of students always asking, inquiring--but nobody had asked this: whether he understands the word, or the sense. And the woman's eyes were so penetrating--those eyes were going to the very depth of his being, and it was impossible to lie. To anybody else he would have said, "Of course I under-stand the sense," but to this woman, this horrible-looking woman, he had to say the truth. He said, "I understand the words." The woman was very happy. She started dancing and laughing, and her ugliness was transformed; a subtle beauty started coming out of her being. Thinking, "I have made her so happy. Why not make her a little more happy?" Naropa then said, "And yes, I understand the sense also." The woman stopped laughing, stopped dancing. She started crying and weeping and all her ugliness was back--a thousandfold more. Naropa said, "Why are you weeping and crying? And why were you laughing and dancing before?" The woman said, "I was happy because a great scholar like you didn't lie. But now I am crying and weeping because you have lied to me. I know--and you know--that you don't understand the sense." The vision disappeared and Naropa was transformed. He escaped from the university, he never again touched a scripture in his life. He became completely ignorant, he understood--the woman was nobody outside, it was just a projection. It was Naropa's own being, through knowledge, that had became ugly. Just this much understanding, that "I don't understand the sense," and the ugliness was transformed immediately into a beautiful phenomenon. This vision of Naropa is very significant. Unless you feel that knowledge is useless you will never be in search of wisdom. You will carry the false coin thinking that this is the real treasure. You have to become aware that knowledge is a false coin--it is not knowing, it is not understanding. At the most it is intellectual--the word has been understood but the sense lost.

aldous huxley's quotes

Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma.
Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

love and bliss

We are born to be blissful, it is our birthright. But people are so foolish, they don't even claim their birthright. They become more interested in what others possess and they start running after those things. They never look within, they never search in their own house.

The intelligent person will begin his search from his inner being--that will be his first exploration--because unless I know what is within me how can I go on searching all over the world?--it is such a vast world. And those who have looked within have found it instantly, immediately. It is not a question of gradual progress, it is a sudden phenomenon, a sudden enlightenment.

The only antidote for the misuse of psychic powers is love; otherwise all power corrupts. It may be wealth, it may be prestige, it may be politics, or it may be psychic--it makes no difference. Whenever you feel powerful, if you don't have love as an antidote your power is going to become a calamity to others, a curse; because power blinds the eyes.

Love opens the eyes, love cleanses the eyes... your perception becomes clear.

I AM

I was regretting the past
And fearing the future…
Suddenly my Lord was speaking:
“MY NAME IS I AM.” He paused.
I waited. He continued,
“When you live in the past,
with its mistakes and regrets,
it is hard. I am not there.
My name is not I was.
“When you live in the future,
with its problems and fears,
it is hard. I am not there.
My name is not I will be.
“When you live in this moment,
it is not hard.
I am here.
My name is I AM.”

i am nobody and i do not want to be somebody

Ego is a social phenomenon--it is society, it is not you. But it gives you a function in the society, a place in the hierarchy of the society. And if you remain satisfied with it, you will miss the whole opportunity of finding the real self.
Have you ever noticed that all types of miseries enter through the ego? It cannot make you blissful; it can only make you miserable. Ego is hell. Whenever you suffer, just try to watch and analyze, and you will find, somewhere the ego is the cause of it.
The longing of the mind is to be extraordinary. The ego thirsts and hungers
for the recognition that you are somebody. Somebody achieves that dream
through wealth, somebody else achieves that dream through power,
politics; somebody else can achieve that dream through miracles, jugglery,
but the dream remains the same: "I cannot tolerate being nobody."
And this is a miracle-- when you accept your nobodiness, when you are just
as ordinary as anybody else, when you don't ask for any recognition, when
you can exist as if you are not existing. To be absent is the miracle.

What is the meaning of life?

What is the meaning of life?" is a question many people ask themselves at some point during their lives.
Some people believe that the meaning of life is one or more of the following:

Survival and temporal success

...to accumulate wealth and increase social status
...to compete or co-operate with others
...to destroy others who harm you, or to practice nonviolence and nonresistance
...to die having succeeded in your purpose
...to live
...to protect one's family
...to gain and exercise power
...to leave a legacy, such as a work of art or a book
...to produce offspring through sexual reproduction or asexual reproduction
...to seek freedom, either physically, mentally or financially
...to seek happiness and flourish, experience pleasure or celebrate
...to survive, including the pursuit of immortality through scientific means (see life extension)

Wisdom and knowledge

...to be without question, or to keep asking questions
...to explore, to expand beyond our frontiers
...to learn from one's own and others' mistakes
...to seek truth, knowledge, understanding, or wisdom
...to try to discover and understand the meaning of life
...to expand one's perception of the world

Ethical

...to express compassion
...to live in peace with each other, and in harmony with our natural environment (see utopia)
...to give and receive love
...to seek and acquire virtue, to live a virtuous life
...to serve others, or do good deeds
...to work for justice and democracy

Religious, spiritual and esoteric

...to turn fear into joy at a constant rate achieving on literal and metaphorical levels: immortality, enlightenment
and atonement
...to achieve a supernatural connection within the natural context
...to achieve enlightenment and inner peace
...to become God, or God-like
...to experience existence from an infinite number of perspectives in order to expand the consciousness of all there
is (i.e. God)
...to follow the "Golden Rule"
...to produce useful structure in the universe over and above consumption (see net creativity)
...to reach Heaven in the afterlife
...to understand and follow the "Word of God"
...to worship, serve, or achieve union with God
...to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land

Other

...to advance natural human evolution, or to contribute to the gene pool of the human race
...to advance technological evolution, or to actively develop the future human
...to contribute to collective meaning ("we" or "us") without having individual meaning ("I" or "me")
...to die, or become a martyr
...to find a purpose, a "reason" for living that hopefully raises the quality of one's experience of life, or even
life in general
...to live, and enjoy the passage of time
...to have fun
...to protect humanity, or more generally the environment
...to pursue a dream, vision, or destiny
...to relate, connect, or achieve unity with others
...to seek and find beauty
...to simply live until one dies (there is no universal or celestial purpose)
...to participate in the chain of events which has led from the creation of the universe until its possible
end (either freely chosen or determined, this is a subject widely debated amongst philosophers)
...to resolve all problems that one faces, or to ignore them and attempt to fully continue life without them,
or to detach oneself from all problems faced (see Buddhism)
...still some do not even think there is any purpose whatsoever (see nihilism)
...as there is no intrinsic meaning to life, to each individual, the "meaning of life" is whatever he/she decides
it is. In that sense, every point above is potentially valid.
...There is no meaning.