Rediscovering Life: Awaken to Reality

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is attachment. The uprooting of sorrow means the uprooting, the dropping of attachments.

So, no one joins in the human enterprise of human dreams and visions and goals so marvelously and so creatively as the person who is unattached. Unfortunately, we’ve come to associate nonattachment with not caring, with not enjoying, with asceticism. No, I’m not talking about that at all. You’ll see this as we go on.

Why don’t we learn? Because we’ve got to live in illusions. It feels good. It gives us a kick, doesn’t it? It certainly gives me a kick. We want kicks; we don’t want happiness. We want thrills. And wherever you’ve got a thrill, you’ve got an anxiety, because you might lose that thrill, or you may not get it. And then you’ve got depression following

Are you getting some inkling of what it would mean if you really grasped this? You’d be above it all. That’s one nice definition of spirituality. Spirituality means no longer being at the mercy of an event, or a person, or anything else. I didn’t say not to love people. I said, You’re not at their mercy anymore. You’re no longer at the mercy of an

The human mind is such an extraordinary thing. It has invented the computer. It has split the atom. It has sent ships into space. It has not, however, solved the problem of human suffering, of anguish, loneliness, emptiness, despair.

The world is full of sorrow. The root of sorrow is desire. The uprooting of sorrow is desirelessness.

We’re scared about things that are not. We’re tied to things that don’t exist. They’re illusions. They’re falsehoods. They’re beliefs; they’re not realities. The agonies we go through over things that we have—we have convinced ourselves that our happiness depends upon them, but it doesn’t.

When misery caused by attachment is dropped, happiness is attained.

The biggest enemy of love is attachments. Desire, in the sense of attachment. You know why? Because if I desire you, I want to possess you. I can’t leave you free. I’ve got to get you. I’ve got to manipulate you so that I can get you, if I desire you in this way. I’m going to manipulate myself, so that I can hoodwink you into allowing me to get you