Passage Meditation - A Complete Spiritual Practice: Train Your Mind and Find a Life that Fulfills (Essential Easwaran Library Book 1)

In meditation, the only equipment you really need is the will, and you can’t buy that through the mail.

Say with perfect courtesy, “This is a poor time to go browsing for a best-seller. Won’t you kindly rejoin me in the room where we’re meditating on the Prayer of Saint Francis?”

“One-pointedness” is a very vivid expression, because it assumes quite accurately that the mind is an internal instrument which can either be brought to a single, powerful focus or left diffuse.

We aren’t helping inconsiderate people when we give in to their demands or let them walk all over us. It only feeds the habit of rudeness to let them have their way. The more insensitive the other person is, the more reason for you to alert your mind to be calm and compassionate and, if necessary, to face opposition firmly but tenderly.

As a novice-master, he advised his charges to forget the world they had left behind. Our goal, on the other hand, is to be “in the world but not of it”: to strive to move gracefully among all the activities of daily life without being ensnared by either outer things or inner desires.

where hurry prevails, there can be no satisfaction for the doer.

When you see opposition, do not get afraid. Look upon tough opposition as a challenge to test your inner growth—to see if your capacities have grown so that through patience, courtesy, and the depth of your conviction, you can win over your opponent into a fast friend.

There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally our habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.

Speed becomes a habit we do not know we have.