Sublime

Say, “Father, help me to understand what is keeping this person from knowing you.”

The great Indian teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj once

The second step is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality.

Now the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness—it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness; and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.

One of these great saints, Ramana Maharshi, used to ask, “Who am I?” We see now that this is a very deep question. Ask it ceaselessly, constantly. Ask it and you will notice that you are the answer. There is no intellectual answer—you are the answer. Be the answer, and everything will change.

Effort does not lead to growth; effort, whatever the form it may take, whether it be willpower or habit or a technique or a spiritual exercise, does not lead to change. At best it leads to repression and a covering over of the root disease.

with a view to making it learn something. If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things, without judgment or condemnation or desire to reform yourself, your observation will be nonselective, comprehensive, never fixed on rigid conclusions, always open and fresh from

If you take a good look at the way you have been put together and the way you function, you will find that inside your head there is a whole program stamped into you, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be, and what you should want. Now, however old you are or wherever you go, your computer goes along with you and is acti