Reading Archives (Author)
Ask Why Your Mind Is Not Free
The word ‘freedom’ has been greatly abused by tyrannical as well as democratic governments, and religions too, everywhere in...
When I Say I Know You
When I say I know you, I mean I knew you yesterday. I do not know you actually now. All I know is my image of you. That image is put...
A Path to Truth
When you speak of a path to truth, it implies that truth, this living reality, is not in the present, but somewhere in the distance,...
Is There Righteous Anger Ever?
One of the most common expressions of violence is anger. When my wife or sister is attacked, I say I am righteously angry; when my...
End Of Violence
Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we...
Fear: Its Beginning, Middle and End
Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present. When there is fear in the active present, is it fear? It is...
Where Skillfullness and Clarity Meet
We have become very skillful in dealing with our daily life; skillful, in the sense of being clever in applying a great deal of knowledge...
Mass Movement
We see throughout the world extremes of poverty and riches, abundance and at the same time starvation; we have class distinction and...
Why Do Social Work?
Q: "I want to do social work, but I don't know how to start." Krishnamurti: I think it is very important to find...
Simplicity of the Heart
Simplicity of the heart is of far greater importance and significance ...
A Key To End Sorrow
The demand to be safe in a relationship inevitably breeds sorrow and fear. The seeking for security invites insecurity. Have you ever...
How Can You Live In This World And Yet Be Innocent?
How can you live in this world and yet be innocent? First, be innocent and then you will live in this world, not the other way round. Be...
He Who Accumulates Cannot Learn
It seems that communion is a very difficult art. To commune with one another over the many problems that we have requires listening and...
Bedrock On Which We All Stand
Do you realize, sir, that you are the world and the world is you? The world is not separate from you and me. There is a common thread of...
Every Sensation Comes to an End
I wonder if you know what it means to be aware of something? Most of us are not aware because we have become so accustomed to condemning,...
Does Life Have A Purpose?
Questioner: Why do you maintain that Life has no purpose? If Life has no purpose, the individual life, even in pure being, can have no...
What Exactly Is Love?
Fear is not love, dependence is not love, jealousy is not love, possessiveness and domination are not love, responsibility and duty are...
Truth is a Pathless Land
Truth is a pathless land. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should...
Creative Revolution
To revolt within society in order to make it a little better, to bring about certain reforms, is like the revolt of prisoners to...
Sorrow
Sorrow has to be understood and not ignored. To ignore it is to give continuity to suffering; to ignore it is to escape from suffering....
Be A Light Unto Yourself
To be aware is to watch your bodily activity, the way you walk, the way you sit, the movements of your hands; it is to hear the words...
What is Time?
Do you know what time is? Not by the watch, not chronological time, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action....
Listening Is A Great Art
You know, listening is a great art. It is one of the great arts we have not cultivated: to listen completely to another. When you listen...
Awareness is Profound Interest
The man who wants to improve himself can never be aware, because improvement implies condemnation and the achievement of a result;...
What is meditation?
The question is not how to meditate, what system to follow, but what is meditation? The 'how' can only produce what the method...
Four Seasons In A Day
If you have lived an experience fully, completely, have you not found that it leaves no traces behind? It is only the...
Addiction
It seems that a believed thought (most often unconscious) underpinning addictions goes like this: ‘something outside of me can make...
The Golden Eternity
I have lots of things to share now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North...
Stopping The War
The purpose of a spiritual discipline is to give us a way to stop the war, not by our force of will, but organically,...
The Poisoned Tree
The maturity we can develop in approaching our difficulties is illustrated by the traditional story of a poisoned tree. On first...
Where We Are Is Our Temple
Expanding our spiritual practice is actually a process of expanding our heart, of widening our circle of insight and compassion to...
Touched by Pain of Life
To live in the present demands an ongoing and unwavering commitment. As we follow a spiritual path, we are required to stop the war not...
Path With Heart
In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected with our heart. In the end,...
Moving The Rocks
A writer I know began his practice with a well-known teacher many years ago. The writer didn't know much about meditation, but after...
The Wisdom Of Uncertainty
One day Ajahn Chah held up a beautiful Chinese tea cup, “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it...
Beauty of True Simplicity
The clutter of our lives binds us to the precious simplicity that surrounds us and within us. Too of ten we become possessed and...
Only Passing Through
Letting go and moving through life from one change to another brings the maturing of our spiritual being. In the end we discover that to...
The Problem of Time
It is necessary to realize that technology itself is not the cause of our problem of [not having enough] time. Its influence on our...
Mistake of Immense Proportion
Since the beginning of recorded history, man has been haunted by the intimation that he lives in a world of mere appearances. In every...
Time: A Mystery & Problem
The question of our relationship to time is both a mystery and a problem. It calls to us from the deepest recesses of the human heart....
Why Are We Running Out of Time?
Technology itself is not the cause of our problem of time. Its influence on our lives is a result, not a cause -- the result of an unseen...
Right Away is the Opposite of Now
Some years ago, I was walking downtown San Francisco with a great friend and a learned Tibetan scholar. I asked him about one of the most...
A 9-Year-Old's Hidden Self
The quality and strength of Lobsang's inner being was also brought home to me through an event that took place in my home. After...
Unlocking a New Sphere of Reality
Being attentive unlocks a sphere of reality that no one suspects. If, for instance, I walked along a path without being attentive,...
My Freedom Is In Your Hands
What if this virus had a hidden agenda other than spreading fear about how it might compromise our health? What if, hidden in its drive...
Divine Darkness
The word Shiva literally means that which is not. That which is, is existence; that which is, is creation. That which is not is Shiva....
Giving and Receiving
Giving and receiving is the basis of all transactions. No interaction can take place without these two. Nowadays, we are constantly...
To Rule Or To Serve
We have to perform action, so let us do it whole-heartedly and let us choose the form of action that we want to do. Now the choice is...
Make Your Life Into a Giving
Make your life into a giving. When I say a giving, it is not to be understood as an act. Giving as an act is a deception because, after...
Garden Teaches Us To Travel
If indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden. All culture has the form of gardening:...
Ourselves We're Helping, Ourselves We're Healing
I am touched by another when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center -- that is,...
Zen Of Archery
In the 1920s, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel moved to Japan and began training in the martial art of archery, with a legendary...
A Higher Level Of Conscious Engagement
We live in an age of spiritual smorgasbord: People are mixing concepts, aphorisms, and insights from a broad variety of mystical and...
Spontaneous Resonance
A friend recently described her spontaneous reaction to a police officer beating a black youth. The cracking sound of a blow to the youth...
The Cauldron Of Time
We who live and breathe in a body see the Creator’s signature as living gold: the gold of a magnificent sunlight splashed on the...
Witnessing: A Form of Compassion
At this time a whole new configuration of science, spirituality and health is in movement. Many of us have come to enjoy fresh insights...
New Year Shift
[A New Year] is upon us, and it will be a year when you and I and conscious people everywhere will need to advance the transformation of...
The Only True Voyage
A garden is a place where growth is found. It has its own source of change. One does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden...
An Ode To Low Expectations
o there i was, staring at my mug of tea. It was 1993. I was sitting over a plate of eggs in the New Piccadilly Café in Soho,...
Mysterious Coincidences
"This is hard to explain," she said. "But the priest put it this way. He said the First Insight occurs when we become conscious of the...
Our Greatest Mistake
Our greatest mistake, in my opinion is to think that human spirituality is somehow already understood and established. If history tells...
The Eagle And The Chicken
A fable is told about an eagle that thought he was a chicken. When the eagle was very small, he fell from the safety of his nest. A...
A Hopeful Skeptic
According to an ancient myth, hope arrived on earth as part of a curse. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and Zeus avenged the theft...
To Be On A Spiritual Path
"To be on a spiritual path means to live mindfully, paying attention to the signs along the road and being conscious of our body...
Blessing For The Longest Night
All throughout these months as the shadows have lengthened, this blessing has been gathering itself, making ready, preparing for...
Dropping Out, Like The Buddha
In an age where being super busy is a badge of honor and accomplishing tasks the greatest virtue, where some activists promote rallies by...
The Weighing
The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the...
Shaped by a Silky Attention
A request for concentration isn't always answered, but people engaged in many disciplines have found ways to invite it in. Violinists...
Looking With Head, Heart, and Hands
When I speak of seeing, I feel that the mind is open and in a relationship to the hands working, which opens a feeling of being more...
Living Lessons of Biomimicry
Biomimics are men and women who are exploring nature’s masterpieces -- photosynthesis, self-assembly, natural selection, and...
Opening the Door to a New Humanity
Over six billion different worldviews are walking on our earth. Every individual I-universe has one. Together we create and carry the...
House of 1000 mirrors
Long ago in a small, far away village, there was place known as the House of 1000 Mirrors. A small, happy little dog learned of this...
Practice Over Parables
A Zen teacher once told me something interesting. We were meditating together at my home when my dog began to bark. He sensed my...
Sympathy, Empathy And Compassion
Pity, sympathy, empathy, compassion. Each is received at various times by one in distress. They are the responses engendered by our...
Being A Social Artist
Let us explore the nature and development of our call to service in ways that link inner and outer realities, universal plans and...
Only Stillness Can Change Us
Your real self, your true nature is what is closest to you: it is yourself. Each step taken to reach it moves you further away from...
Silence
Silence is our real nature. What we are fundamentally is only silence. Silence is free from beginning and end. It was before the...
Seeing is an Act
The question is not what to do but how to see. Seeing is the most important thing -- the act of seeing. I need to realize...
Seeing Is Not Thinking
The question is not what to do but how to see. Seeing is the most important thing—the act of seeing. I need to realize that it is...
A Walk in the Rain
As the story goes, I was walking through the rain on a cold Autumn evening in Oxford. The sky was getting dark; I was wrapped up warm in...
Your Life Cannot Go Wrong
In reality, your world is set up so that nothing happens to you, but everything happens for you - for your awakening, for your growth,...
Somehow I'm Always Held
In my short time on this planet, I have known great sorrow, plunged into the depths of oceanic despair, been thrown so deeply into my...
Compassion: an Objective Form of Empathy
As the Dalai Lama explains, if you are walking along a trail and come along a person who is being crushed by a boulder, an empathetic...
This is the True Ride
My friends, let’s grow up. Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here. Or if we truly haven’t noticed,...
Difference Between Eah and Oh!
After walking some distance, stopping for a cup of tea, and winding my way back to the apartment, I happened upon an older, homeless man...
My Stroke of Insight
One of the greatest lessons I learned was how to feel the physical component of emotion. Joy was a feeling in my body. Peace was a...
Honor the Seed
Honor the seed. The words seem so simple. This is knowledge that was passed down to me from my father. Yet, today, those simple words...
Wherever you are Be there
One of the major reasons why we fail to find happiness or to create unique lifestyle is because we have not yet mastered the art of...
Spiritual Life Begins Within The Heart
The truth is that we spend our lives in the centrifuge of paradox. What seems certainly true on the one hand seems just as false on the...
Compulsion To Closure
Somewhere recently, I heard or read the phrase, “compulsion to closure.” I can’t recall how it was used by whoever said...
Vows Of Active Hope
On the last afternoon of a two-week intensive workshop, Joanna Macy was out walking and met a young monk from the retreat centre hosting...
Being Acted Through
Here's a discovery we can make along our ecological Pilgrim's Progress: the discovery of what can happen through us. If we are...
The Three Narratives
When we come together for this work, at the outset we discern three stories or versions of reality that are shaping our world so that we...
The Shambhala Warrior
[A Tibetan Legend] "There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Barbarian powers have arisen. Although they waste their...
A Heart Wide Open
"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could...
The Rich Experience of A Quiet Mind
Entertainments, in whatever form one cares to take them, are necessary and indeed vital to happiness in the ordinary sense of the word....
The Power of Art
Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable...
When Someone Deeply Listens To You
When someone deeply listens to you it is like holding out a dented cup you've had since childhood and watching it fill up with...
Four Stages Of Groundedness
The ground is both a metaphor and a felt sense. As a metaphor, it means to be in touch with reality. As a felt sense, it refers to...
The Super Chrysalis
While walking along a creek path a few weeks ago, I stopped to inspect a Monarch Waystation that had been constructed this past spring....
For the Traveler
Every time you leave home, Another road takes you Into a world you were never in. New strangers on other paths await. New...
From Sincerity to Authenticity
One of the most vulnerable living forms in creation is human. At this moment, there are people in a doctor's office getting news that...
May Your Cup Always Overflow
I've never made a fortune, And I'll never make one now But it really doesn't matter 'Cause I'm happy anyhow. As...
Letter on the Kitchen Table
Dear Ego, I’m breaking up with you. No more circular discussions, no more eleventh hour recriminations. We’re through. This...
Processing Anger With An Open Heart
Anger is an intense and primal expression of the life force, a burning flame that cannot be ignored. It is the psyche’s alarm...
Well-Knotted Rope
There is a scene in the marvelous movie Lost Horizons, in which a group of travelers become stranded in the Himalayas. They are met...
Parliament Of Subconscious Minds
You may object to the idea that your sense of being a self is a mere construct. After all, it feels very real. How can we reconcile this...
Reclaim Your Chicken
Being does not require thought. Be fully attentive, gently attentive. Trust the natural ease of awareness. Make no effort. No trying, no...
Painting the Inner Sistine Chapel
Just as we need scaffolding to build a building, just as scaffolding was needed for Michelangelo and his apprentices to paint the frescos...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Mindfulness is considered the heart of meditation but its essence is universal and of deep practical benefit to all. In essence,...
Being Connected Within
With our mobile phones and wireless palm devices, we are now able to be so connected that we can be in touch with anyone and everyone at...
Shifting Your Relationship With Pain
Have you ever noticed that your awareness of pain is not in pain even when you are? I'm sure you have. It is a very common experience,...
Voluntary Simplicity
The impulse frequently arises in me to squeeze another this or another that into this moment. Just this phone call, just stopping...
Strong Enough To Be Weak
If you are a strong-willed and accomplished person, you may often give the impression that you are invulnerable to feeling inadequate...
We Are Weavers
we are weavers woven into and from an ancient ever renewing fabric on an invisible loom more subtle than breath at one...
Indigenous Perception in a Modern Body
I was similar to other suburban kids and was moving towards more involvement in sports when I happened to meet a person on a street...
Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.
When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very...
Between Gift And Privilege
I’ve been wondering: What makes something a gift? What is the difference between a gift and a privilege? What...
A New Energy Grid
In a ceremony a couple years ago, I received a powerful teaching. I was invited to think of some things for which I felt grateful....
The Power of Myth
MOYERS: Why myths? Why should we care about myths? What do they have to do with my life? CAMPBELL: My first response would be,...
Don't Side With Yourself
Through mindfulness, our hearts become spacious enough to hold the painful emotions, to feel the suffering of them, and to let them go....
Keep Your Eyes On The Horizon Of Kindness
Change rides in on many speeds. Lightning speed and we change worlds of perception overnight. We can suddenly lose everything, or gain...
Remember
Remember the sky that you were born under,...
Inhabiting The Body
To live within the body is to be in contact with the internal space of the body. To inhabit our hands, for example, means that we are in...
Reality Of Actual Contact With Oneself
The reality of actual contact with oneself is, at the same time, actual contact with our environment. It is a very...
We Are Between Stories
We live in an exciting time. As cultural historian, Thomas Berry put it: "We are between stories." The old story -- bracketed...
Fire
What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too...
10 Principles of The Artist's Way
It is my experience both as an artist and as a teacher that when we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to...
On Love
I see so many people talking about the world's problems but so few talking about the solution to them: Love. It really is that...