You can see all the happenings in yourself, if you watch it. You can see fully, completely, in one glance; not take analytical time on it. You can see in a moment the whole structure and nature of this shady little thing called ‘me’, my tears, my family, my nation, my belief, my religion - all that ugliness, it is all inside you. When you see it with your heart, not with your mind, when you see it from the very bottom of your heart, then you have the key that will end sorrow.

 

When you study and learn about yourself there comes extraordinary strength based on clarity, which can withstand all the nonsense of the establishment. This strength is not a form of resistance or self centred obstinacy or will, but it is a diligent observation of the outer and the inner. It is the strength of affection and intelligence.

 

When you learn about yourself, watch yourself, watch the way you walk, how you eat, what you say, the gossip, the hate, the jealousy - if you are aware all that in yourself, without any choice, that is part of meditation.

 

Meditation is a state of mind, which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive; then you are attentive to the system and that is not attention. Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life – perhaps the greatest – and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody; that is the beauty of it. It has no technique and therefore no authority.

 

Meditation can take place when you are sitting in a bus or walking in the woods full of light and shadows, or listening to the singing of birds or looking at the face your wife or child.

 

You will never understand about the space between yourself and the stars, yourself and your wife or husband, or friend, because you have never looked without the image and that is why you don’t know what beauty is or what love is. You talk about it, but you have never known it except perhaps at rare intervals of total self-abandonment.