Still the Mind

If we talk all the time, we won’t hear what anyone else has to say, and if we think all the time, we will never experience the nature of our organic existence.

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, and lives in a world of illusions.”

After all, you must become serious if you think that something is desperately important, but you will only think that something is desperately important if you are afraid of losing it. In one way, however, if you fear losing something, it isn’t really worth having.

if you think that the greatest ideal in life is to be invulnerable, then you are on your way to becoming geological rather than spiritual.

One of the problems when people ask for miracles is that they never know what the miracle they ask for ultimately involves. That is why magicians and genies always grant three wishes, so that after the first two you can always use the third one to get back to where you began.

Once, Carl Jung felt that he had met a man with no human failings at all, and he was terribly disturbed, because it made him feel guilty. He thought that he should probably take a closer look at himself. Then a day or two later Jung met the man’s wife, and he ceased to worry about it. It wasn’t because she had said, “You should know my husband is very difficult to live with.” That wasn’t the story at all. Instead, the wife embodied all the things that were repressed in her husband, because when you live together that intimately you begin to share your psychic life. So if one becomes too much of a light, their partner may grow compensatory and become a shadow, and vice versa. So there has to be the element of rascality — but not too much, just a pinch of it.

So when you want to become something more than you are, different from what you are, or higher than where you think you are, all that means is that you haven’t discovered where you are, and you are under the illusion that there is somewhere else that you ought to be besides here.

Then we begin to think about the stages one goes through in getting to be more where they are than they were before. You find this particularly in sophisticated circles, where people are concerned with spiritual and psychological development, and with religion. Some very curious games are played, and many of them are forms of spiritual one-upmanship. People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

wonder if we could somehow be made over so that we would not have to worry about our problems. But if you examine the desire to overcome this mess through a spiritual discipline, you will see that this wanting to overcome the mess and not to have it anymore is precisely the mess. The thing that we object to about ourselves is precisely what we continue to do in our attempts to overcome it

person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts, and lives in a world of illusions.”